The Electoral Commission (EC) has reassured the public that the missing Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) Kits cannot be utilised to access its system or data.
According to Dr Eric Bossman Asare, the BVRs, which include a laptop, are ineffective on their own and can only be activated by the EC.
Thus, they pose no threat to the integrity of elections, he stated.
Additionally, they cannot be used to register anyone during the ongoing limited voter registration exercise nor do they contain any sensitive data from the EC’s system, he said in an interview with JoyNews’ Evans Mensah.
Dr Bossman Asare stated, “The laptops on their own are insignificant. They are just like the laptops you use at your workplace. We’ve accounted for every single device that we’re going to be using.
“In 2020, when we did the registration, we bought 8,500 of the registration devices. We are not using all of them in this registration.”
“So that means the ones we are using now, we still have some there. So are you saying the EC will come and tell the Ghanaian people that five laptops are missing and we want to use those laptops to register people? Who in the EC is going to do that?” he quizzed.
When queried about the possibility of someone within the Commission accessing the system with the stolen BVRs for unauthorised purposes, Dr Bossman insisted that could not be done within the EC ranks.
“There is no fear. It’s not possible. It’s just not possible that something like that could happen,” he added.
These assurances come in response to concerns raised by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) regarding the missing BVR kits.
At a press conference on May 9, the Chairman, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, said that the party feared that the stolen kits could be used to illegally register some people to add them to the voters register.
This, he said, would enable them to vote on December 7, 2024. “That remains our suspicion,” he said.
For this reason, they called for EC to provide the serial numbers of the BVRs used in the ongoing registration exercise so they could track the data ensuring there has been no interference.
However, Dr Bossman reiterated the EC’s stance, indicating that proving the serial numbers is a security risk.
But, he assured that the EC has consistently been transparent with the data on the voter register and provided the data from the limited registration before and during the exercise.
He added that they will continue to share the information on the exercise even after the registration has been closed.
“I think as of yesterday, we had registered 302,000. You should be able to add this number to what we have on the roll. After the registration, hopefully, we’ll get about 650,000.
“We add to the 17.9 (total number of voters), and we are hitting about 18.4. If you are a party and have all these figures, you should have a fair idea of the total numbers that have been registered.”
“So in that event, the numbers are not adding up. You should be able to alert the EC that ‘your registration, you got these numbers. How come I’m seeing this?’ The idea of the serial numbers is you are not going to get anything,” Dr Bossman Asare added.
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