A four-day lapse between council staff realising a laptop containing nearly 15,000 postal voter details was missing and reporting it to police was called into question last week.
A preliminary report containing the chronology of events surrounding the theft of the laptop – which contained names, addresses, dates of birth and signatures – was put before elected members at last week’s full council meeting.
It emerged that council staff realised three unused laptops were missing on October 13 which was handled within the department.
But more than three weeks later, on November 5, they discovered that an electoral services laptop containing sensitive data of postal voters was also missing.
But the matter wasn’t reported to police for four days and it took the council until November 16 to inform the insurers about the four thefts.
Read more in the Herts Advertiser.