EC is Sneaking Out BVDs to Recycling Companies at the Blindside of IPAC-Bright Simons
The Electoral Commission (EC) has been caught sneaking out Biometric Verification Devices (BVDs) to recycling companies at the blindside of IPAC and the public.
Senior Vice President of Imani Ghana, Bright Simons who disclosed this said he discovered that the EC had been sneaking out biometric devices that are core components of the BVMS to recycling companies without any public notice.
According to him, his checks showed that these actions had never come up for discussion during the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meetings, through which the EC engages with its political stakeholders.
He also discovered that the EC never opened any public tenders for these sales of sensitive equipment to recyclers.
Worst of all, he discovered through painstaking checks that the recycling companies engaged for the exercises do not have the strict certifications for secure data destruction that is required when disposing of sensitive equipment like this.
“IMANI have since done our checks and we are shocked at the EC’s recklessness.
But this is the same EC we encountered in 2020. They did everything they could to twist the facts, hide information, and outrightly lie to justify their decision to jettison the existing BVMS so that they could procure a brand new one”, he said.
He added “ it is universally known that wiping off data from electronic devices does not permanently erase them. Hence, disposal of electronic equipment containing sensitive traces of personal data, voter information no less, requires extremely thorough protocols that only a few specialised recycling companies, properly so certified, can handle”.
According to IMANI the EC’s press statement it issued in response to Bright Simon’s expose was full of lies, half-truths, and pure fantasies, maintaining that we were not prepared for the sheer mendacity, audacity, and shamelessness of the EC’s response to our colleague[Bright Simons].
The EC in its statement said only 10 biometric verification devices (BVDs) were “auctioned” and that they “found their way” into a recycling plant.
But IMANI will have none of that saying the obvious questions that the media ought to ask are a) before the EC jettisoned the existing system, it had told Parliament that it had implemented a “2 BVDs per polling station” policy and therefore had more than 70,000 BVDs in stock. Then in 2020, it proceeded to buy a brand new set of biometric voter registration (BVR) kits with corresponding BVD kits and swore (despite video evidence collected by Bright Simons) that they never used any of the pre-existing devices in the 2020 mass voter registration exercise.
Why then did they auction only 10 out of the over 70,000 devices? Why “10”, and not 5, 100, or 1000? How have the remaining tens of thousands of devices been disposed of? Ghanaians who have been paying attention to the EC’s strange conduct under the current leadership know that the EC admitted to have lost some BVRs recently, but when pushed it insisted that they were only five in number. There is a clear pattern here. What exactly is going on?
- The EC claims that the 10 BVDs were auctioned, and that they just somehow then found their way into a recycling plant. Who were the auctioneers? Are they registered auctioneers licensed to conduct auctions by the Auctioneers Registration Board?
How was the auction advertised?”, INANI queried.
