According to the national electoral body, it has adequately tested and ensured all the devices deployed are working efficiently.

[contextly_sidebar id=”lyecvtZWwcPGOb6NvVowy196Q4R6k8rK”]Yussif Ayuba, a Deputy Drector of Communications at the Commission in an interview on Eyewitness News, said it was impossible for the EC to deliberately deploy faulty BVDs as speculated by the NPP.

“..That cannot be possible, and it is not true that the Electoral Commission is going to deploy faulty BVDs to the strongholds of the New Patriotic Party. It is never true, and it is not possible for the Electoral Commission to hatch something of this nature,” he said.

According to him, the EC has ensured that all the available BVDs are intact, and has adequately prepared a backup plan for the devices that may inadvertently breakdown during the upcoming polls.

“These BVDs we’ve spoken a lot about it, and we’ve said we are going to deploy 2 BVDs per polling station, and in addition to that, we’ll have backups at the constituency level and also at the regional level.”

He expressed worry that some political parties fail to inform the EC first about their challenges with the systems put in place ahead of the election; but instead resort to the media to make their grievances public.

He called for a better collaboration between the Commission and the various political parties, to ensure the elections are free, fair and transparent.

“It is a stakeholder collaboration. It is not just the Electoral Commission that will ensure that the elections are peaceful. Every Ghanaian, every political party has a stake in ensuring that all these things are achieved.”

“Sometimes when we hear some of these issues, it looks a bit strange to us. We would want the political parties to collaborate with the Electoral Commission more so that if problems are identified, then we solve them as a collective.”

The NPP has in recent times raised a number of concerns about some of the Electoral Commission’s actions ahead of the elections.

Recently, the party said the Commission had printed its logo without the party’s initials, as has been done for the other political parties. It also accused the EC of authorising the printing of pink sheets without serial numbers which it said was illegal.

The NPP’s actions appear to indicate a situation of mistrust for the EC; but the Yussif Ayuba says the Commission has been transparent and open to the parties.

“The Commission has been very open to all stakeholders in the electoral process. You’ll realize that in addition to having IPAC meetings, the commission has even come up with walk in sessions…. you don’t need a prior appointment with the EC when you have a concern. You will have access to all officers who will address your concerns.”

The EC later released the statement below to this effect:

EC HAS NO PLAN TO DEPLOY FAULTY BVDs

We would like to assure the general public, particularly those who are voting on December 7 that the Commission does NOT deploy faulty Biometric Verification Devices (BVDs) for elections. All our BVDs are fully tested to ensure their optimum functionality before they are deployed for electoral activities.

Therefore it is totally inaccurate for any political stakeholder to claim that they have uncovered a non-existent plot by the Commission to deploy faulty machines to their strongholds.
For the avoidance of doubt, we would like to repeat that on election day, we plan to do the following:

1. The Commission will deploy 2 BVDs to each of the 28,992 polling stations across the country. In total, the Commission is deploying over 70,000 well tested BVDs on election day.

2. The Commission has made provision for sufficient backups at each of the 216 District Offices. These will be deployed to any polling station which would require them. As a result, we do not expect any polling station to operate without a fully functioning BVD.

3. All staff who would be operating the BVDs on election day are currently undergoing rigorous training to prepare them for the task ahead.

4. Additionally, 4 technicians will be deployed to each of the 216 district offices to provide technical support and rapid response to each of the polling stations to deal with any unforeseen technical challenges at any polling station within the district on election day.

5. These same machines were used in all the by-elections we have conducted since 2013 and the district level elections in 2015 without any challenge or complaints.

6. It had been agreed at IPAC that in case of failure of any of the machines to verify a registered voter, provision has been made for manual verification of the voter in order not to disenfranchise him/her.

7. Finally, we would like to urge any stakeholder in the elections who claims to have “uncovered a plot” to deploy malfunctioning BVDs to its strongholds to make details of the said plot available to the Commission to enable us take preemptive actions to forestall its occurrence. It does not help anyone to just put out such claims in the media without providing any iota of proof.

We would like to emphasise that the ‘Special Walk-in Service’ created by the Commission, is an additional platform for the political parties to table all their concerns and issues for urgent discussion and resolution. We urge them to take advantage of it for the good of the electoral process.

Thank you.

Signed:

ERIC KOFI DZAKPASU
Head of Communications

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By: Jonas Nyabor/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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