Refusing to disclose all the information and finer details of this alleged grand plan, the source told the New Statesman that several clandestine meetings between the ruling party and the top hierarchy of the EC have been held in recent weeks, specifically about this proposal. This has even resulted in planned changes at the IT Department of the EC.
According to the source, at the last meeting held last week between the two parties, it was agreed that the NDC’s biometric register should employ the same format as that of the Electoral Commission.
This, in the view of the EC and NDC officials gathered, will be the first step in ensuring the merger of the two registers in time for the December 2016 updated register.
What was, however, strenuously refused was the use of Superlock Technologies Limited by the NDC to carry out its registration exercise. This proposal by the NDC officials, according to our source, was refused by EC officials, who feared that this would draw the eye of the general public on the NDC’s exercise, with Ghanaians reading so many meanings into this.
“It was agreed that the NDC should employ a different IT company, other than STL, to conduct their exercise. However, the NDC was advised to ensure that the company employed the format used by STL,” the source added.
The source further estimated that the cost of the membership registration exercise is put at tens of millions of dollars. How the ruling party was going to fund this multi-million dollar project is not yet clear.
The EC source claims that the existing national biometric voters register was intentionally bloated in some selected areas to allow the ruling party the space to do multiple voting.
Separate intelligence picked up by the New Statesman suggests that the entire membership registration exercise would itself be bloated, feeding directly on EC data in the Volta Region and other selected areas, including in the Ashanti Region, to "establish straight away that the NDC has the numbers.”
“They intend to register as many as 4 million people as party members. A party with membership strength of 3 million people, for example, can so easily claim 6.5 million votes at any presidential election," one source disclosed.
Also, the NDC intends to use this fiction of strong membership population to 'justify' its fundraising activities. Experience from the 2012 polls has convinced the NDC that "blank cheques work in elections in Ghana". The party is, therefore, looking immediately at ways to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars it intends to pour into the 2016 general elections.
From the information that this paper is gathering, it is already obvious that, with 3 years to the next election, the NDC is focusing more on how to be declared winners in 2016 than on how to govern.
The EC source put it this way: “Simply put, this membership registration exercise is an attempt to prepare a separate biometric register that would be used to create a platform to rig the election in 2016.”
The EC’s source told the paper that should such a scenario pan out, the NDC could decide to register under-age children in their strongholds where they know the NPP cannot check effectively and then that becomes the voters register in that part of the region in 2016.
"Once the NDC exercises the freedom (without any noising from the NPP) to register as many foreigners or under-18s as possible, it can then conspire with its collaborators in the EC to transfer that data onto the EC's."
Similarly, the source intimated that the registration of minors by the NDC could happen in the Ashanti Region where they know is the stronghold of the NPP.
IT analysts who spoke to the New Statesman explained that such a merger of the two biometric registers is a real possibility, as there are currently no control measures to make it impossible for the two registers to be merged. In addition, the analysts told the paper that there is no agency in Ghana that has the responsibility of ensuring that such controls are in place and are working.
“A typical scenario was shown in the Presidential Election petition where the register presented by Dr Kwadwo Afari Gyan for some polling stations was different from the registers given to the various political parties. Also the total number of voters in Dr Afari Gyan’s register was different from what the petitioners had. Remember this is soft data,” the IT analyst stated.
---
Quelle/Source: The Statesman Online, 16.10.2013
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
