Voters' register too compromised, no audit can clean it - Bawumia

The 2016 Vice-Presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has dismissed calls for an audit of the voters’ register.

According to him, the register and the whole Electoral Commission database has been compromised to the extent that no audit can make the Register clean.

Dr. Bawumia made these comments in New York at the end of the 1^st International NPP Youth Conference on Saturday.

Insisting on the need for a new register, Dr. Bawumia explained that aside the thousands of other Nationals who are on the Ghanaian Register, the biggest issue which demonstrates that the Register and the ECs whole outfit has been compromised, is the evidence of scanned pictures which have found their way onto the register.

Showing samples of the scanned pictures in the register, Dr. Bawumia explained that those pictures could only find their way into the register because the system had been compromised by the very people in charge.

He explained that because the system demands that the pictures used for the register be taken at the spot of registration and automatically entered digitally, it was absurd for there to be pictures in the register with staple pin marks.

This phenomenon according to him, could only mean that people in charge of the EC’s database had connived with others to register people improperly and smuggle them into the Register.

“What is really worrying about all of this is the discovery of a pattern of scanned pictures in the register. When you go to register, it’s a digital picture that is taken but we noticed scanned pictures which can be by staple marks on them.

“This for me is the scariest part of our findings. How did these pictures get on the Register? What mechanism allows you to be able to scan pictures and dump them into the register?It can only mean that the integrity of the system has been compromised.

“This is because you will need security permissions; passwords etc to be able to access the database and add scanned pictures to them. So the system and the people in charge of the system have been clearly compromised. This is one of the reasons why we are asking for a new register”, he stated.

Dr. Bawumia spoke about the ongoing biometric registration of members of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) as another issue that suggested largely that the register has been compromised.

He explained that currently the NDC is going round registering members by taking only their names and their Voters’ ID Cards and without any machines but strangely is able to do ID cards for those who register with their biometric data on it and their database.

This scheme in his view, suggests that the NDC has been given access to the EC’s database as that could be the only way the NDC could get access to all the details and biometric data of those who register with their party.

Dr. Bawumia showed what he claims are samples of the voters identified to be on both the Ghanaian and Togolese Registers including some who had been discovered on Registers of various Greater Accra constituencies since the Party first presented its case to the EC and the Ghanaian public.