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Maintain High Integrity In Your Work, Presby Moderator Tells EC

The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Rt. Rev Prof. Joseph Obiri Yeboah Mante, has urged the Electoral Commission (EC) to do all in their power to maintain high integrity in their work.

The Moderator said this when the Chairperson of the Commission, Mrs. Jean Mensa addressed the General Assembly Council of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG) at its quarterly meeting at Abokobi in Accra on Tuesday on the need for the compilation of new voters’ register before this year’s general elections.

Rt. Rev Prof. Mante urged the Commission to find more outlets to publicize its point of view on the need for new voters’ register in a language accessible to the general public.

Addressing the General Assembly Council, Mrs Mensah once again assured the nation that it has no intention to rig this year’s general election in favour of any political party or individual.

The decision of the Commission to compile a new register has been met with opposition by some political parties and Civil Society Organizations.

Mrs. Mensa justified the need for a new voters’ register on the following grounds among others: save the country some money, safeguard the integrity of the election process by not leaving the control of data in the hands of vendors of ICT equipment and overcome the deficiencies of the existing equipment and data; she insisted this was necessary to render the electoral process reliable, credible, transparent and trustworthy.

According to the Commission, the quality of the voters’ register played a critical role in the electoral process and an obsolete and incomplete register could not be relied on for an electoral process which guaranteed the principle of one man, one vote.

According to the Commission, the IT infrastructure, that supports the Biometric Voting Management System (BVMS) must be modern, secure, reliable, robust and have the necessary performance features to meet tight electoral timetables and demanding service requirements.

The EC Chairperson made emphatic statement that the current system in place simply cannot meet the requirement to support the 2020 general election and beyond. She said that the server, storage and networking hardware at the Data centres on which BVMS applications run on were all obsolete and have reach “end of life”.

According to the Commission, the current Biometric Verification Devices (BVD) were unable to verify candidates electronically which led to high incidence of manual verification in the last District Assembly Election.

The Moderator later led the house to pray for the Commissioners, the nation and peaceful election 2020.

Mrs. Jean Mensah was accompanied by her two deputies, Dr. Eric Bossman Asare and Mr. Samuel Tetteh and Mrs. Sylvia Annor, Ag. Director of Public Affairs.

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