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Director of Elections for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Martin Adjei Mensah Korsah has raised concerns about the upgraded biometric registration kits which the Electoral Commission wants to use for pilot exercise on March 12, 2016 in all the ten regions.

According to him, it is not clear to the political parties whether the upgraded machines means the EC has bought new ones with high specs or the features of the old ones have been upgraded as he didn’t see anything of that sort during the demonstration.

Speaking on Okay Fm’s 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show, Martin Adjei Mensah indicated that the demonstration of the supposed upgraded biometric machines did not provide samples but kept the data in the machines.

He added this will not help to ascertain the effectiveness of the machines as they print out the names of the voters correctly; bemoaning the representatives of the parties were not allow to ask questions except to observe the process.

“The foreign experts doing the exhibition said they have been instructed by EC not to answer any question and if anyone has a question, it should be directed through the EC whereas there was no representative of EC standing by to answer questions. This is the kind of lack of transparency people complain about,” he fumed.

He however said that the polling agents of his party have been alerted to follow the pilot exercise to see if there will be an opportunity to ask questions.

He again mentioned that the number of selected polling stations for the pilot exercise will not help to capture a true reflection of how the machines will work effectively during the limited registration exercise.

He disclosed that the political parties were not given prior notice about the pilot exercise but raised his main concern to be the auditing of the electoral register as this exercise will amount to nothing if steps are not taking to fix this register.