The Electoral Commission has stated that, the new voter registration is supposed to confirm capable and significant use of technology to safeguard the validity of the ballot count and also the acceptance of results.
According to the Commission, the standard of the current voters’ register opposes an essential role within the electoral method obsolete and incomplete register couldn’t be relied on for an electoral method, that secure the principle of one man, one vote and acceptance of results among stakeholders was the reliance on how to correct and competent it identifies folks and properly eliminates fraud.
On Tuesday 31st December 2019,Deputy Chairman of EC in charge of Operations, Mr. Samuel Tettey made a public decision of the EC at a press conference in Accra and indicated that the current voters register was over bloated and that there had not been an effective means of cleaning it.
He mentioned in an exceedingly finite political climate, wherever there was a complete lack of trust among parties concerned within the electoral method, biometrics enabler if it’s not up-to-date and responsive. “It’s solutions should be complete and comprehensive to render the electoral method reliable, credible, clear and trustworthy,” he added.
The IT infrastructure, “that supports this biometric voting management system should be modern, secure, reliable, sturdy and have the mandatory performance options to satisfy tight electoral timetables and tightened service requirements”.
Addressing a press conference at its headquarters in Accra on Tuesday, December 31, 2019, the EC’s Deputy Chairman in charge of Operations, Mr. Samuel Tettey, said it would make more economic,cost effective and operational sense to obtain the new system than to keep the current system and overhaul them at a high cost of recurrent replacement of foible parts and renewal of warranties. Mr.Tettey noted that as a result of over bloating, EC has to use manual verification where voter’s finger prints cannot be verified.
An amount of US$70.96million (GHC390.3 million) would be needed to do the compilation exercise which would begin in April this year,the report said.
Part of the money would be used to acquire new biometric voter management system (BVMS) and biometric voter register kits as well as upgrading of the biometric verification device (BVD) to ensure an improved system,Mr. Tettey added.
“Their component parts currently often breakdown and replacements to fix them and some other important parts are difficult to obtain and this may be due to the fact that the manufacturer is not no longer producing them or running supports for them, and this makes the value of maintenance of the equipment too expensive. Value quotation offered by the prevailing merchant for the melioration and upgrade of existing system was as high as obtaining a totally new infrastructure (both hardware and software) in place”, he stated.
According to him, the information backup system in the current system basically freezes often thus no entries may be made into the system took days to complete.
Written by:
Akosua Aniwah.
Reference:
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