IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

The proposition, brought forward by a non-parliamentary initiative boasts a 130,000-signature petition in its support, Trend.az reports.

Eight opposition parties came together to sign the proposal, which, if passed, will help the nation determine the exact number of voters involved in the upcoming election.

Germany will be the first European country to introduce integrated circuit chips containing personal identifying information and a digital facial, according to Heise Online, a German news agency.

The new ID card will contain all personal data on the security chip that can be accessed over a wireless connection.

The new card allows German authorities to identify people with speed and accuracy, the government said. These authorities include the police, customs and tax authorities and of course the local registration and passport granting authorities.

The German Government's biometric ID card programme leaves crucial legal, financial and technical questions unanswered and represents a "gigantic laboratory test", according to a report soon to be issued to the country's parliament.

The people in line have come to Old Delhi to register for their Aadhaar number. The 12 digit number is issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India, which has been tasked with giving everyone in the country a numerical biometric ID so they can access services like banking and benefits.

An estimated 300 million people in the country of 1.2 billion have no official identification documents, according to UIDAI. This prevents them from opening bank accounts or getting work in the formal sector.

Such a move, he said, would help members of the party to vote and elect capable leaders who would lead the party to victory in the 2016 elections.

Mr. Oheneba Atuahene, who is also the National Chairman of the NDC Old Guards Association, gave the advice in an interaction with the Daily Graphic in Kumasi recently.

The verification process, he said, was yet to receive a concrete decision from the EC and explained that even though the two — the registration and the verification — complemented each other, the EC would go ahead with the registration, with the hope of receiving more funds to do the verification.

“If done well, biometric voter registration can ensure a verifiable voters register, in the sense that a person’s name can occur only once in the register and at a specific polling station, thereby ensuring that that person can vote only once under his or her name,” Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan said.

According to a source at the EC, with that provisional figure, the EC was on course to achieving a successful biometric voters registration, which ends on May 5, 2012.

The EC projected to register 13 million voters before the beginning of the compilation of the biometric voters roll.

The Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, told Parliament in an in-camera session on Friday that the total number will shoot up after the biometric exercise takes place in Akuse. The area was exempted from the exercise as a result of legal issues over whether the EC had the mandate to bring Akuse under Greater Accra Region. The Supreme Court ruled that it should remain under the Eastern Region

Mr Gilbert Akomea, Director, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Department of EC, said such registrations did not follow any pattern, neither did they come from any particular part of the country or Region, but were widespread across the country.

According to him, only the two features made the 2012 voter registration a biometric exercise and marked it differently from previous registration exercises, otherwise all other information such as name, sex, age, residential address, hometown, names of parents whether dead or alive, etc, which were also collected during the exercise, had previously been collected.

It said upon being served with the further and better particulars by the petitioners on 11,916 polling stations where alleged irregularities took place, it examined and analysed its records, adding, “the analysis confirmed that, no voters were allowed to vote without verification at any polling station.”

According to him the Electoral Commission is estimating a little over 12 million people to be registered when the entire process comes to an end on May 5, 2012. The exercise is in its second phase with reports of violence still pervading some of the polling stations across the country. Parry said 600 duplicate registrations have been detected, adding that the anomaly cut across all parts of the country.

Mr Kwasi Owusu Mintah, official of Superlock Technologies Limited, consultants to the Electoral Commission (EC) on the biometric kits, said at a workshop that all other capacities of the lap top had been blocked.

He was speaking at a workshop on the biometric registration exercise at Koforidua in the Eastern region organized by the EC in collaboration with the New Juaben Municipal Assembly for Assembly members and heads of department in the Municipality.

The measures include registration officers working for longer hours and during weekends, when and where necessary; the deployment of more equipment where patronage is very high; and the use of a booking system which schedules clients to appear at various times of the day to avoid spending unnecessarily long hours waiting for their turns at the various registration centres.

Mr Oppong Kyekyeku said this during the election of Chairmen for the Essikado-Ketan and Sekondi Sub-Metropolitan District Councils at Sekondi.

He said biometric registration would prevent multiple registrations and that the problem of minors registering would have to be checked at the registration centres.

The biometric registration process which was scheduled to commence at seven o’clock, commenced at nine thirty at most registration centers in the Weija constituency in Accra.

Some of the centers in the constituency were Rect Academy, Holy of Christ church in the Kwashiebu electoral area, Toll- Booth registration, Gedan Tuba electoral area, Langma registration center and D/A Primary Dampase electoral area, were slowed down because scanning machines were not running at a fast pace.

The four-day operation is intended to guide the EC to identify shortcomings and make amends before the actual registration which is scheduled to take off towards the end of March.

The exercise, which ends tomorrow, is being carried out in two centres of each of the 10 regions of the country.

However, investigations undertaken by The New Statesman suggest that the ruling party, which has still not come to terms with biometric verification, is shifting the responsibility of funding the process to Ghana’s ‘development partners’.

The two-day testing of the process which is being organized by the Electoral Commission (EC) is taking place in some selected polling stations across the country.

The exercise according to the EC is aimed at ensuring the biometric machines are properly tested to avert any technical difficulties on voting day.