The laptop in the biometric registration kits can not be used for other ITC services

The laptop in the biometric registration kit cannot be of much use for any Information, Communication and Technological (ICT) service apart from the bio-data collection because the laptop was designed specifically for bio-data collection.

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 on Thursday organized by the EC in collaboration with the New Juaben Municipal Assembly for Assembly members and heads of department in the Municipality.

Mr Mintah said at the end of every registration day, the information captured by the registration officials would be captured on a pen drive and sent to the District Electoral Office, the Regional Electoral Office and the head office of the EC to be captured to serve as a back-up.

He said the EC has a central processing centre that would match the finger prints and the pictures of all voters who would be registered in the country and if detected any double registration, the system would remove the name from the voter’s register and place it under a different information pack for a body to sit on all the removed names to decide their fate.

Mr Mintah said it would be difficult for anybody to accept bribe and enter data into the laptop used for the registration after close of registration because the system records the time that the information is fed into the system.

Once information was recorded outside the registration hours, it would be detected by the central processing center and a query would be issued to the District Electoral Officer to find out if any registration had taken place at that time.

Ms Lydia Agyiri, New Juaben Municipal Director of the Electoral Commission, said anybody qualified to be registered as a voter could challenge the registration of any voter but that should not stop the fellow from going through the registration process.

She said the only difference would be that the fellow whose registration was challenged would not be given a voter registration card.

The challenger and the voter challenged would have to appear before a Voter Challenged Review Committee made up of representatives of the political parties, the EC and other bodies.

Ms Agyiri said if the issue is reviewed in favour of the voter, his voters registration card would be given to him or her and the name would be added to the voter’s register else the EC would look at the issue and when necessary hand over the fellow to the police for prosecution.

The New Juaben Municipal Coordinating Director, Mr Samuel Donkor who chaired the function, appealed to the Assembly members and the heads of departments to help educate the people on the registration procedures to help reduce the rumours surrounding the exercise to enable the country to have a successful voter registration exercise.