Incredible EC Dupes Ghana Ghc 400 Mil, Reverts To Manual Verification

In what smacks of double-standards, the Electoral Commission (EC) Chairperson, Jean Mensa, has admitted that the much-touted new Biometric Verification Devices (BVDs) will not work optimally during the general elections in December, and some voters would have to be verified manually.

Jean Mensah told wide-eyed parliamentarians when she finally agreed to meet them to render an account of her stewardship towards the elections.

She claims the EC is “not expecting many manual verifications though…,” yet, as usual, refused to give the lawmakers the benefit of specifics.

Similarly, the EC has refused to give specifics about the so-called 30,000 people it claims it had deleted from the new register. Calls for the EC to publish these names to forewarn those who may have been affected have fallen on deaf ears.

Incidentally, the posture is fuelling speculations claiming that the EC had secretly registered tens of thousands of voters’ ID cards that will supposedly be used on Election Day by agents of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) to rig the elections.

The EC has denied these allegations, but its consistent posture is reinforcing these suspicions. Critics think that the EC is proposing to allow manual verifications because those with these cloned cards cannot be verified electronically, as the systems will immediately alert duplication.

 Yet, the ultimate basis for the EC to push for a new voters register was that it was changing the “outdated” BVR used in previous elections with one that had multiple verifications systems, including fingerprint and facial verification to prevent the manual verification that the old machines were sometimes forced to resort to.

In December 2019, when the EC was making a case for the GHC 400 million that would be blown on new BVRs and a new voters’ register, it claimed “The current Biometric Verification Device (BVD) is unable to verify several voters electronically resulting in a high number of manual verification on voting day.”

The EC said “This compromises the integrity of the elections. NIST studies have shown that image quality has a direct impact on identification match accuracy. Poor fingerprint image quality can have the following negative impacts in an AFIS System.”

In a statement released then, the commission wrote that: “The Commission intends to reduce the increasingly high identification failure rate by using new scanners and software with improved fingerprint capturing algorithm and the use of certified fingerprint image quality assessment software to ensure image quality. Registration officials will now, have real-time image quality feedback to improve capture.”

Critics have questioned the wastage of taxpayers’ money and the deceptive signals the EC has given as its basis for overhauling the old voters’ register. The EC had claimed the old one was full of minors, foreigners and duplicates. Yet, hardly had it finished compiling its much-touted new register than the election regulator inaugurated a committee to clean it because it was replete with duplications, and ineligible voters.

A similar double standard was displayed for the reasons informing the need for new BVRs. Indeed, some civil society organisations like IMANI discovered that the EC had indeed used some of the old BVRs in the recent voters’ registration, despite the total rubbishing of those machines.