Samuel Tetteh – Deputy Chairman in charge of Operations
The Electoral Commission (EC) has announced it will be procuring a new Biometric Voter Management Sysyem ahead of the 2020 General Election.
According to the EC, the new system will come with additional facial recognition feature to improve verification of voters.
The new system is also expected to reduce the increasingly high identification failure rate by using new scanners and software with improved fingerprint capturing algorithm.
The current Biometric Voter Device (BVDs) and the Biometric Voters Register Kits(BVRs) the Commission said, are unable to verify a number of voters electronically resulting in a high number of manual verification on voting day which tends to compromise the integrity and credibility of elections.
Mr. Samuel Tettey, Deputy Chairman in charge of Operations, addressing the media in Accra on Tuesday said the move was based on the advice of the EC’s IT team and external consultants to the effect that, it would be prudent to acquire a new system rather than refurbish the current biometric verification equipment which are more than 7 years old, End-Of-Life (EOL) and can hardly be supported.
“We would be like to announce that the items in the present BVRs are End- of-Life including laptops. This means that no components are available to repair the items. For purposes of availability, maintainability and compatibility in the future we recommend to purchase new BVRs,” he quoted a letter from the vendors of the original manufacturers.
Justifying the move he said, in the just ended District Level Elections, out of a total number of Five Million, Four Hundred and Thirty One Thousand, Nine Hundred and two (5,431902) verified, Thirty-Four Thousand, Eight Hundred and Forty Three (34,843) were manually verified.
“This is a significant number which can determine the winner of an election.
The inclusion of facial recognition will completely eliminate manual verification and will ensure that the will of the people stands and that every vote cast matters,” he said.
He further noted that The commission would also be purchasing a new software and storage equipment since the current software is outdated and out of support.
“The Linux servers are currently Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.8, and the Windows Servers are a combination of 2003 and 2008 editions,” he added.
The deputy director in charge of operation explained that while it has been suggested the Commission could buy a new server and storage equipment and run the existing applications on them, the operating systems for example are so obsolete such that they do not have the necessary software drivers to run the new devices on the server.
“Also the application code has not been tested on the new infrastructure to certify its compatibility,” he said justifying the need for the new Data centre.
Cost Efficient
Mr Tettey mentioned that the cost of frequent replacement of BVD and BVR kits’ failing parts and the renewal of warranties through third-parties was comparable to the acquisition of a brand new system with full service and warranties.
“The Commission spent close to Two Million Ghana Cedis just for refurbishment of the BVDs and BVRs ahead of the DLE,” he lamented.
He again noted that the cost of updating the obsolete Data Centre as proposed was to have cost the Commission Fifteen Million United States Dollars ($15 million) exclusive of taxes.
“Today, the Commission is acquiring a new Data Centre at Six Million United States Dollars exclusive of taxes,”he added.
Further, Mr. Tettey added that the cost of refurbishing the obsolete BVR kits as proposed by the previous vendor was 3,500 Dollars per kit. This is how much we are buying a new kit for.
He said the cost of procuring a new BVR Kit as proposed by the previous vendors was $5,145 exclusive of taxes but the EC intends to procure the new BVR kit for $3,500 inclusive of taxes.
“Furthermore, the cost of upgrading the obsolete BVDs as proposed by the previous vendor was $244 and the cost of a new BVD as proposed by previous vendors is $917 exclusive of taxes. The Commission intends to acquire new modern, user friendly BVDs for 400 USD inclusive of taxes. At the end of the procurement process we will inform Ghanaians about the actual costs involved,” he explained.
He said the Commission has begun an international competitive tender process in which the solutions were disaggregated – software, hardware and Data Centre.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri