Jean Mensa
The Electoral Commission (EC) is on track to compile a new
voters’ register to replace the blemish-fraught roll.
This came to light during the EC engagement with some civil
society organisations (CSOs) at Alisa Hotel in Accra yesterday to justify the
need for the compilation ahead of the 2020 general elections in December.
The determination of the commission could not have been
better expressed than when it pointed at its lack of control over the source
code to the country biometric data, an important ingredient for an independent
management of elections.
The EC represented by some of its
top officials, one of them an IT expert, raised concern over the security of
the electoral system as one of the key reasons a new voters’ register must be
compiled.
The commission does not own the source code of the current Voter
Management Solutions (VMS), a situation which 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, Samuel
Tettey, said that 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 the unavailability of source code had hindered the
efforts of the EC to build an in-house capacity and to recruit skilled
Information Technology (IT) professionals to man the system.
“It is highly unwise on our part to continue to run a
solution we do not have control over and this will be a huge risk to the
country and it is akin to us giving our sovereignty to a vendor,” he said.
“Staff members of the electoral commission on the current
solution were not trained per the contractual terms to enable the commission to
take over after the system after expiration of the contract. The EC staff
members were, therefore, not able to update or enhance the software solution,”
he disclosed.
Data Centre
He disclosed that the vendor of the system had since 2012
charged the EC a maintenance fee of $4 million per annum to also manage the
data centre that needed to be updated at a cost of $15 million before the
December elections.
“But today we are acquiring a new data centre at $6 million,
exclusive of tax. Which of the two is more cost beneficial?” Mr. Tettey
queried.
Dr. Yaw Ofori Agyei, who is an IT Consultant, also hinted at
a risk of data loss with the current system as there is no backup or data
recovery plan.
He also identified some operational issues with the system
that included the application system designs that gave no insight into the
quality of data being egested.
He said that there were no checks and balances in the system
to determine if some records were missing.
“This process had to be done manually through a laborious
process of running queries on the database and cross-checking it with manually
recorded tallies from the field,” he said.
CSOs Onslaught
DAILY GUIDE is
informed that the CSOs arrived at the Alisa Hotel, venue of the engagement,
armed with their already-prepared press statement rubbishing the reasons for a
fresh voters’ register.
The sincerity of the guests of the EC was already punctured
even as they pretended to have turned with open minds.
They headed for the International Press Centre immediately
after the meeting to rubbish the points the EC raised in favour of a new
register.
Plain Facts
In the statement they presented to the media, the CSOs
referred to the controversy underpinning the EC’s determination as being about
plain facts and values which can be resolved by what in their estimation are “transparent
and sincere evaluation of the data and the evidence.”
The CSOs claimed to have thoroughly examined the EC’s
submissions and found them quite defective.
STL’s Correspondence
On the EC’s position on the costs for the refurbishment and
fresh procurement of equipment, the CSOs said “the EC should be canvassing the
market for the cost of these equipment, and investigating the possibility of an
open-source central software application, as Nigeria has done in recent years.”
Benchmark
“We believe that the EC has not demonstrated that there is a
defect with the biometric data which was used as recently as two months ago on
a nationwide scale to necessitate spending $70 million on mass registration,”
they insisted, adding that “it has already conducted limited registration for
the district elections and should be using that benchmark cost for the general
elections limited registration.”
Fingerprint
Had the EC, according to the CSOs, reached out to truly
independent experts to advise it “no biometric authentication system can offer
a 100% matching accuracy under our conditions at the scale we are talking
about. The EC cannot be in a position to seriously assess the quality of the
existing system if it relies on the information provided by a single vendor or
narrow set of vendors.”
NIA
The CSOs asked the EC to seek the support of the National
Identification Authority (NIA) which they said “will be in perfect tandem with
the law and be a most justified approach.”
Fresh Procurement
It is the view of the CSOs that “under the present
circumstances, the expense for an end-to-end system, as opposed to a precise
surgical augmentation and improvement of the existing
system, is not justified.”
“If even we have to spend money in collecting new data they
said ‘then it is the NIA which must do so and complete its database and
National Identification process, which we were promised would be complete by
now.”
Facial Recognition
The proposed addition of Facial Recognition according to the
CSOs ‘is an exotic appendage which adds little after the person has been
identified by fingerprint, name, location and other attributes.”
If the present fingerprint system doesn’t identify the person, there is little the additional facial recognition can do, and if it identifies the person, the facial recognition is superfluous even if desirable.
By Issah Mohammed