The executives of the national and the entire membership of the New Patriotic Party -Japan branch has said the excessive demonstrations from the Civil Society Organizations and the opposing political parties will not produce the needed solution to the issues raised.
According to the NPP in Japan, deliberation and putting practical knowledge together is the surest way of addressing this issue.
A statement jointly issued and signed by
Kwaku Adu – Acting Communications Director, Mr. Asiamah-Bosompem Mark – Branch Organizer and Mr. Constance Yeboah – Youth Organizer said “We believe that all explanations made by the EC and other IT experts should be able to convince the opposing parties and the CSO’s to rally their support behind the EC so that together we can have a credible voter register to go into the 2020 general elections.
The statement said “We by this release employing all CSO’s and political parties against the creation of a new voter register to ignore the financial cost as being raised by them and look at how a credible register would help the country to strengthen its democracy and ensure that the processes and outcome of results from the 2020 general elections would be reliable, credible, transparent and trustworthy.”
The party “believes that the current register has some shortfalls that must be corrected before the country goes to polls on the 7th of December 2020 and the best way to correct this is by getting a new voter register.”
The Electoral Commission has said the new voter registration is meant to ensure an appropriate and meaningful use of technology to safeguard the efficacy of the ballot count and the acceptance of results.
The EC has said it was planning to procure a new biometric voter management system (BVMS) and compile a new voter register since the current system is outdated and the procurement of the new BVMS and compiling of a new register will save the country GH₵173.07 million, compared to upgrading the current system.
The EC through their officials and IT experts have raised concern over the security of the electoral system as one of the key reasons a new voters’ register must be compiled. Some of the issues raised are that the commission does not own the source code of the current Voter Management Solutions (VMS), a situation that subjects the system to manipulation by third parties including vendors, thereby compromising the security and credibility of elections.
The Deputy EC Chairman in charge of Operations, Mr. Samuel Tettey in his address to the media stated that the server, storage and networking hardware at the Data centers on which BVMS applications run on were all obsolete and have reached “end of life” and “end of support”. Their component parts now frequently breakdown and parts to repair them are unavailable because the manufacturer no longer produces them or supports them.
The contractual agreements that were entered into with the vendor of the system prior to its acquisition in 2011 did not make provision for the commission to own the source code of the software solution. He said in a tense political climate, where there was a total lack of trust among parties involved in the electoral process, biometrics cannot be an adequate enabler if it is not up-to-date and responsive. Its solutions must be complete and comprehensive to render the electoral process reliable, credible, transparent and trustworthy. He said the unavailability of source code had hindered the efforts of the EC to build in-house capacity and to recruit skilled Information Technology (IT) professionals to man the system. He said it was highly unwise on their part to continue to run a solution they do not have control over and this will be a huge risk to the country and it is akin to the country giving our sovereignty to a vendor.
Source: Kofi Atakora
