The President of the Polish SA will address citizens' complaints regarding the envelope elections
The President of the Personal Data Protection Office has withdrawn all cassation complaints from the Supreme Administrative Court in cases related to the transfer of citizens' data to the Polish Post for the purpose of conducting the so-called envelope elections.
In April 2020, during the pandemic, the then-government attempted to organize presidential elections exclusively by mail. Preparations for these elections began before the enabling legislation came into effect. To estimate the number of ballots to be delivered to various postal nodes, the Ministry of Digital Affairs provided the Polish Post with voters' personal data from the PESEL register on a CD. The database contained personal identification numbers and residential addresses.
The data from the PESEL database were entered into the Polish Post's IT system and were destroyed only when it became clear that the elections would not be conducted exclusively by mail.
As a result, citizens lodged complaints with the President of the Personal Data Protection Office regarding the violation of their rights by the Polish Post, the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and some local authorities. However, at that time, the President of the Personal Data Protection Office refused to initiate administrative proceedings due to the existing legal decision by the Prime Minister at the time of the data transfer from the PESEL register. This referred to the administrative decision of April 16, 2020, which imposed an obligation on the Polish Post, as mentioned in Article 99 of the Act of April 16, 2020, on special support instruments related to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, for which the acquisition of personal data by the postal operator was necessary. In the then-assessment of the President of the Personal Data Protection Office, there was a legal basis for providing these data to the postal operator, and the acquisition of personal data by the Polish Post was based on Article 6(1)(c) of the GDPR.
Out of 232 complaints, the President of the Personal Data Protection Office left 123 unexamined due to formal deficiencies, and in 105 cases, it issued decisions refusing to initiate proceedings. Thirteen individuals appealed these decisions of the Personal Data Protection Office to the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw, which ruled in favour of eight of them. The President of the Personal Data Protection Office filed cassation complaints against these judgments to the Supreme Administrative Court in 2021 and 2022.
The President of the Personal Data Protection Office, Mirosław Wróblewski has withdrawn these cassation complaints. In one case, the Supreme Administrative Court has already discontinued the cassation proceedings, as a result of which the supervisory authority is conducting administrative proceedings in this matter. If the Supreme Administrative Court discontinues the cassation proceedings in the remaining seven cases, the supervisory authority will also address them.
It should be noted that the decision of the President of the Personal Data Protection Office to withdraw the previously filed cassation complaints stems from the fact that on March 13, 2024, the Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the cassation complaint of the Polish Post against the judgment of the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw of February 26, 2021, issued in the case of the Ombudsman’s complaint against the action of the Minister of Digital Affairs regarding the provision of personal data from the PESEL register to the Polish Post. As a result of this Supreme Administrative Court ruling, the judgment of the Voivodeship Administrative Court, in which the court declared the action of the Minister of Digital Affairs in providing personal data from the PESEL register to the Polish Post as ineffective and violating the legal provisions in force at the time, became final.