Almost crestfallen by the inability of their representatives at the just ended two-day forum on the voter register to convince the Electoral Commission to compile a new register for the 2016 elections, the opposition New Patriotic Party appear to have finally accepted the position of the other stakeholders for the election managing body to “cleanse” the register.
Leading the biggest opposition party’s present position on the voter register is NPP chief spin doctor and well-acclaimed instigator of Electoral Reforms, Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, who is not only advocating for an audit and cleaning of the register, but also wants the precise form that will be accepted by all.
The Former Director of the Danquah Institute, few days after the NPP was unable to prove allegations of a bloated register at the Accra forum, in a lengthy article titled “Will Auditing And Cleaning Up Give Us A Credible Register”?, stated “we have elections in exactly in 12 months’ time. If we are to have an audit we must define the scope of the audit, what it is supposed to achieve, when it will be done and who must do it and get on with it.”
Gabby, as he is affectionately called, stated that it was obvious majority of political parties and civil society groups that made presentations at the EC forum “preferred the auditing and cleaning up of the register to scrapping it altogether to compile a new one. It was obvious after Charlotte Osei spoke for the EC that the Commission was for maintaining the existing register.”
Now opting for auditing of the register which he and his party, the NPP, have until recently steadfastly rejected, Gabby wrote “The UNDP has already done a general performance audit of the EC. What is required is a specialized information systems kind, called “automated data processing and computer audits”, to examine the authenticity of the voter information collected, the system’s efficiency and security protocols, and the governance or management controls of the EC’s entire information technology infrastructure. We need an IT audit to tell us whether the current infrastructure is safeguarding our electoral roll, maintaining its data integrity and, therefore, fit for the purpose of giving us a credible base document for credible elections.
What Ghana’s electoral body requires is an independent forensic audit of the biometric register and this must be done by an ISACA-certified information systems auditor, who must be picked through an open, competitive international tender process. There has to be, for instance, an audit trail to determine if any breach in security of the EC database has occurred and if so, who did it, when was it done and what actions can be taken to prevent future breaches.”
While the party’s foremost architect of Electoral Reform has now ceded to the EC and other political parties and civil society groups’ position for the register to be audited, he nonetheless, wants the exercise to be done by an independent body other than the constitutionally mandated election management body.
Proposing how the register should be audited, the former DI director said “A complete audit will determine the main problematic areas where a lot of people (or ghosts) have been registered illegally and also bring out the structural weaknesses apparent in the current system relied on by the EC. The audit should start by analyzing and biometrically comparing each voter’s biometric record against every other record in the current database. This comparison should use at least 4 to 6 fingerprints of every voter. The audit should also include a thorough analysis of the personal information of voters to determine patterns that may point in the direction of duplicated or invalid information.
With the biometric duplicates and other possible faulty records identified, we could ensure that only unique records are left to be analysed. The next step would be to determine if there are minors or deceased people registered as voters. One of the ordinary ways to ensure having correct information would be to compare against the available information in the national Births and Deaths Registry and other third party source registries available,” he stated.
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