CSOs Flay EC Says It Has No Constitutional Authorization To Create New Biometric Register,

A coalition of major Civil Society Organizations in the country has dismissed the Electoral Commission’s insistence on compiling a new biometric voters’ register for the 2020 election pointing out that the election management body has no constitutional enablement to do so.
 
A statement released on the issue highlights that it is the National Identification Authority (NIA), rather than the EC which has the constitutional authority to build a biometric data base.
 
It therefore advises that the EC, rather than create a brand new biometric data base, source biometric data from the NIA to compile its register if it so desires.
 
According to the Coalition, Article 45 of the Constitution which provides the EC its cloth of authority, “states that the EC SHALL COMPILE. This does not suggest that the EC must create a totally new system. Indeed, the law envisages a situation where the information exists in various forms or even at various places and requires the EC NOT to re-create the information, as in collect new Primary Data at great expense, but to COMPILE the data. A compilation clearly means the EC must collate it from existing sources.
 
“Incidentally and fortunately, there exists a national institution set up and empowered by law to collect such information for the purpose of National Identification and related uses, As set out below in the Act. 
 
“This specific national institution set up for the function of data collection, is an AUTHORITY on the subject; whereas the EC is a COMMISSION, for Elections, and not even on the subject of Data Collection. In any contention, an Authority on the subject has more legal right to perform the function than a Commission set up for a different purpose.”
 
The Coalition is led by the Ghana Anti Corruption Coalition and includes IMANI Africa, SEND Ghana,Africa Centre for International Law and Accountability (ACILA), Financial Accountability and Transparency – Africa (FAT-Africa), the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) and Youth Bridge Foundation.
 
Others are West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI), Citizens Movement against Corruption (CMaC), Human Rights Advocacy Centre (HRAC) Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)
Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG) and Parliamentary Network Africa (PNA).
 
They advise that the EC source data from the NIA if it really believes that it needs to discard the old biometric system and compile a brand new register since legally it has no authority to generate a new data base of biometric data.
 
Even so, the coalition dismissed every single excuse that the EC has given as justification for the compilation of a new register saying that the old already existing register only needs improvement.
 
It warned that the issues that the EC is playing with are technical by nature and not administrative and therefore, rather than posture as an expert on biometry, it advised the EC to seek the guidance of experts in that field.
 
“This is a controversy over plain facts and values which can be resolved by a transparent and sincere evaluation of the data and the evidence, most of it relates to Information Technology over which the EC as a body has no inherent expertise, but which IT Experts can understand and agree on. We (and our IT Experts) have thoroughly examined the Electoral Commission’s submissions and found them quite defective.”
 
The Coalition also expressed discomfort with the EC’s over reliance of opinions of the vendor ofv the biometric kits that it wants to procure to justify its need to compile a new register saying if the EC had been open minded about the process it would have seen that even prices that STL is quoting to it are higher than what is on the market.
 
It pointed out that the EC has not been able to justify that the existing biometric data that it has has become unusable, saying that if anything at all, the EC should seek to clean the existing data and augment it with additional registration rather than discarding the register and compiling a new one in an election year.