The Electoral Commission has clarified its decision to go in for a new biometric system and compile a new voters’ register ahead of the 2020 general election. According to the Commission, most of its current biometric devices are faulty adding that Ghana will incur extra cost in repairing the devices compared to procuring new ones.
The Commission also explained that the software being used to run the current biometric devices is outdated and out of service.
Addressing the media yesterday, Deputy Chair of the EC in-charge of Operations, Samuel Tettey, noted that the new biometric system the Commission intends to procure will have a facial recognition technology to be deployed in cases where the device is unable to verify fingerprints of voters.
He said the Commission intends to reduce the increasingly high identification failure rate by using new software to improve fingerprint capturing and image quality. Mr Tettey said the current biometric voter device and the biometric voter registration kits are challenged by their inability to do biometric fingerprints.
He disclosed that prior to the December 17 district level elections, the Commission spent close to two million cedis repairing some of the faulty biometric devices. He said the process was labour intensive and as such, more hands were brought in to help repair the faulty devices.
