Everyone who followed IMANI’s exchanges with the Electoral Commission in 2020 carefully would have noticed that IMANI was against the compilation of a new electoral register for one major reason: shady procurement and waste of resources.
Over the years, some partisan fanatics have tried to make it look as if IMANI was merely crying wolf. Very few have actually looked at the substance of IMANI’s case, which was mainly that Ghana’s biometric voting management system (BVMS) had cost the nation tens of millions of dollars to put together, was still in good shape, and needed only minor maintenance to be fit for the purpose of running the 2020 elections.
The Electoral Commission did everything they could to twist the facts, hide information, and outrightly lie to justify their decision to jettison the existing BVMS so that they could procure a brand new one.
A few days ago, our colleague, Bright Simons, who continues to monitor the EC closely discovered that the EC had been sneaking out biometric devices that are core components of the BVMS to recycling companies without any public notice. His checks showed that these actions had never come up for discussion during the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meetings, through which the EC engages with its political stakeholders. He also discovered that the EC never opened any public tenders for these sales of sensitive equipment to recyclers.
Worst of all, he discovered through painstaking checks that the recycling companies engaged for the exercises do not have the strict certifications for secure data destruction that is required when disposing of sensitive equipment like this.
IMANI have since done our checks and we are shocked at the EC’s recklessness. It is universally known that wiping off data from electronic devices does not permanently erase them. Hence, disposal of electronic equipment containing sensitive traces of personal data, voter information no less, requires extremely thorough protocols that only a few specialised recycling companies, properly so certified, can handle.
But we were not prepared for the sheer mendacity, audacity, and shamelessness of the EC’s response to our colleague. The EC’s press statement was full of lies, half-truths, and pure fantasies.
