EC Boss-Jean Mensa Says The Current Register Can Be Manipulated to Change the Outcome of December Polls

The Chairperson of the Electoral Commission-Jean Mensa has stated that the existing voters’ register is feeble and susceptible to manipulation which could endanger and change the outcome of the December election.

Speaking to the leadership of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Accra on Friday, 12 June 2020 on the compilation of the new register, she said the reason for compiling a new register was to promote free, fair and transparent elections, Joy Fm reported.

Jean Mensa added that the current system had established potential room for election manipulation, with dire consequences on the general election, and that is why the EC wishes to correct it.

She also added that the use of the current voters’ register will force the Commission to rely mostly on manual verification since capturing of fingerprints in the last registration exercise was poorly done.

“Our experts advised us right from the onset, that in acquiring the new system we will be changing the system operating the biometric voter management system-and it meant that we have to migrate the data from the old system to the new system,” she said.

“The result was that we could risk and indeed we did stand to risk losing a lot of data of citizens who have registered. You will go on voting day and your names will be missing from the register and this was not a risk that we wanted to take. I can image the fury and uproar that would occur in this country if people go on voting day and their names were not captured.” she added.

“Because the quality of the fingerprint is so low, when you go on election day and you are trying to verify, you realize that your fingerprints cannot be verified. What happens then is that you come with a card and we allow you to vote. This could lead to manipulation in the sense that the card may not belong to you and because we don’t have the feature for facial recognition, you could come in with the card and you are allowed to vote and if there’s collusion at the polling station level, it could lead to a high level of manual verification,” Jean Mensa further stated.

Source: GhanaFeed.Com