The Electoral Commission’s (EC)’s scheduled voter exhibition on September 18,2020, may not materialise following damning revelations that a bulk of the EC’s voters data could have been lost or compromised.
The EC has already postponed the exhibition exercise twice-from September 11, 2020, to September 16, 2020.
WhatsUp News has been finding out from insiders that the EC’s indecision is driven by a big problem that the EC’s data transfer, and that voter records of many Ghanaians have allegedly been corrupted on the EC’s servers and all attempts by the EC to retrieve them have proven futile.
Insiders tell Whatsup News that the curious postponements are a result of the EC attempting to micro-manage the hot mess.
Whatsup News gathered that during the just-concluded new voters registration exercise, officials had done offline registration with intent to transfer data into the EC’s system later.
However, when time came for the transfer to be effected, the EC’s technicians realized that a lot of the data that had been captured offline had somehow been corrupted and made irretrievable.
In one Polling station where 2000 voters were registered, only 100 of the registrants’ data was recovered, according to a source.
After the EC’s technicians had tried for a long time and failed to retrieve the data, a decision was taken to retrieve hard drives of the biometric devices and reset them in attempt to trick the system into opening up. However, the system responded by wiping out thousands of the captured data, sources say.
Already, the EC had hinted that the brand-new register is bloated with foreigners, and minors, and had appointed a committee to manually correct those alleged anomalies.
However, investigative journalist, Kevin Ekow Taylor thinks that the entire situation is part of a grand agenda of the EC to rig the December 2020 elections for the ruling NPP.
According to WhatsUp News sources, the Jean Mensah led EC is now munching on the idea of returning to the old voters’ register. However, the conundrum with this tentative decision is that Constitutional Instrument (C1) 94, which governed the 2016 elections has been amended by Parliament.
The amendment was what made way for CI 126 which is supposed to govern the 2016 elections.
Sources say the EC is in a state of panic and is allegedly printing a lot of fake biometric cards which are reportedly going to elements of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).
According to sources, the data corruption mess on the hands of the EC means that the EC may likely be constrained to exhibit the register, constituency by constituency; rather than by Polling Station. In the new format, people with fake biometric cards can then have their data transferred to various constituencies where they can verify their names using the multiple formats that the new system is capable of.
Once such people are able to do multiple verifications, leeway is created for them to vote multiple times during elections.
Meanwhile, the new BVRs that the EC has brought into the country, are said to be only 5,000, a number that is very inadequate for the whole of the country which operates over 30,000 registration centres.
No official statement has been issued from the EC to explain the postponement as the reports of a data corruption gains ground.
Should these reports be confirmed, the EC boss, Jean Adukwei Mensah would have wasted some GHC 443 million which was the budget for the new register that critics fruitless contested as needless.