WILL AUDITING AND CLEANING
UP GIVE US A CREDIBLE REGISTER?
Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko
November 02, 2015
Last week, the NPP led a brave charge for a new
register at a public forum which I maintain was
arranged to reject that very proposition. Leading
the vociferous charge against disturbing the current
register was the ruling National Democratic
Congress, supported by parties, most of whom exist
only on paper, but have reserved seats at the IPAC
table.
Such is the colour of irony that as NDC General
Secretary Aseidu Nketia was on his feet at the Alisa
Hotel, trying to convince the nation that even if
the register was bloated throwing it away was not
the answer, 7 miles across the road in the capital,
at Teshie, the Ledzokuku constituency, the NDC was
busily giving a practical demonstration of what they
do when faced with a bloated register: burn the
entire document.
Angry NDC members, believed to be supporters of the
Ledzokuku MP, Sena Okitey Duah, said the party
register for this month’s parliamentary primary was
bloated. They alleged that it was bloated with
non-members of the NDC, specifically NPP members.
They did not want a situation whereby NPP members
would be deciding who to represent the NDC in 2016.
They were not prepared to do what their General
Secretary was recommending to the nation. Their way
was to tear up the register and set it up in flames
even before the electoral roll was distributed for
exhibition across centres in the constituency.
With a few exceptions (including IDEG and PPP), I
was disappointed by the quality of presentations at
the two-day public forum last week (Oct 29-30),
which was billed to interrogate whether or not the
solution to Ghana’s register, if bloated, was to
compile a new one or not. It was as if the stage was
set to interrogate only the position of those who
wanted a new register. No effort, no question, no
presentation was made to interrogate the other
twinned option – auditing and cleaning up -- the
very option which many anticipate the panel will end
up recommending.
Auditing and cleaning up are both technical, and if
you were eagerly waiting to here the IT expert on
the panel, Dr Nii Narku Quaynor, to ask probing
questions on that, then I am sorry if you were left
disappointed.
An audit is not a solution. It is only to point the
way to what needs to be done. We have elections in
exactly 12 months time. If we are to have an audit
we must define the scope of the audit, what it is
supposed to achieve, when it will be done and who
must do it and get on with it.
It must be noted, however, that just three months
ago a performance audit of the EC was done by the
UNPD. Surprisingly, this important fact did not get
a single mention at the forum. Is it because the
UNPD audit report is extremely critical of the
management and integrity of the Commission’s
database system and the nature of the contractual
relationship between the EC and its vendor, STL?
“The electoral process in Ghana is faced with a
number of challenges such as electoral fraud,
violence, bloated register, and intimidation of
election officials,” the UNDP report bleats.
That report, titled “Conduct of an Institutional
Assessment and the Development a Strategic Plan for
the Electoral Commission of Ghana”, wasissued 16
August 2015 -- two days even before the NPP came out
with its ‘bombshell’ press conference, showing how
the register was allegedly bloated with cross-border
registrations, fake entries that could only have
been fraudulently inserted by staff with privileged
access to the EC central database system and huge
statistical variance between Ghana’s population
trends and the growth in numbers in the electoral
roll of certain constituencies.
An overwhelming majority of those who were given the
opportunity to speak at the EC forum, mainly
political parties and civil society groups,
preferred the auditing and cleaning up of the
register to scrapping it altogether to compile a new
one. It was obvious after Charlotte Osei spoke for
the EC that the Commission was for maintaining the
existing register. In fact, she went as far as to
claim that the EC had upgraded its AFIS software, as
if to say it was quite capable of undertaking any
clean up exercise by itself.
Yet, when the EC attempted to do a little
demonstration on Friday in front of TV cameras to
show how reliable its system was, it suffered an
embarrassing system failure. It was a propaganda
exhibition, with Koku Anyidoho tellingly as its
volunteer, which went terribly wrong. To me, that
system failure was microcosmic of the kind of
Mandelbug virus responsible for the varicose veins
affecting the healthy management of our electoral
roll. The Mandelbug is a bug whose causes are so
complex it defies repair. Not a single question was
asked at the public forum about how the Electoral
Commission and its vendor, STL, were managing our
database.
The forum completely ignored probing the technical
challenges confronting the EC information system in
order to help the panel make an informed
recommendation on the way forward. How was this
possible, a cynic might ask, when the EC, in its
wisdom, settled on an IT expert for the five-member
panel, who is a leading member of the party that is
leading the campaign that says, “all is well with
the EC”?
Again, the EC did not tell Ghanaians when and how it
intends to give effect to the October 2014 Supreme
Court decision and allow the estimated four million
people who registered in 2012 using an NHIS card to
register again; but, this time with an identity card
that is constitutional.
AUDITING
Instructively the UNDP report remarks, “STL has not
been transparent with the officials of the IT
department to enable the latter to understand how
the system functions even though STL officials are
based in the IT Department of the EC.” (The full
UNDP report can be downloaded
fromwww.danquahinstitute.org)
The report laments, “The management of biometric
database has been outsourced to STL who was expected
to train and fully hand over the system to the IT
Department of the EC before the 2012 elections. STL
has not respected this component of the contract as
at this assessment in August 2015. The implication
is that the EC will be unable to conduct biometric
registration without STL.”
The UNDP has already done a general performance
audit of the EC. What is required is a specialised
information systems kind, called “automated data
processing and computer audits”, to examine the
authenticity of the voter information collected, the
system’s efficiency and security protocols, and the
governance or management controls of the EC’s entire
information technology infrastructure. We need an IT
audit to tell us whether the current infrastructure
is safeguarding our electoral roll, maintaining its
data integrity and, therefore, fit for the purpose
of giving us a credible base document for credible
elections.
What Ghana’s electoral body requires is an
independent forensic audit of the biometric register
and this must be done by an ISACA-certified
information systems auditor, who must be picked
through an open, competitive international tender
process. There has to be, for instance, an audit
trail to determine if any breach in security of the
EC database has occurred and if so, who did it, when
was it done and what actions can be taken to prevent
future breaches. “These inquiries must be answered
by independent and unbiased observers,” according to
renowned experts – see Rainer, R. Kelly, and Casey
G. Cegielski. Introduction to information systems.
3rd ed. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley ;, 2011. Print.
A complete audit will determine the main problematic
areas where a lot of people (or ghosts) have been
registered illegally and also bring out the
structural weaknesses apparent in the current system
relied on by the EC. The audit should start by
analyzing and biometrically comparing each voter’s
biometric record against every other record in the
current database. This comparison should use at
least 4 to 6 fingerprints of every voter. The audit
should also include a thorough analysis of the
personal information of voters to determine patterns
that may point in the direction of duplicated or
invalid information.
With the biometric duplicates and other possible
faulty records identified, we could ensure that only
unique records are left to be analysed. The next
step would be to determine if there are minors or
deceased people registered as voters. One of the
ordinary ways to ensure having correct information
would be to compare against the available
information in the national Births and Deaths
Registry and other third party source registries
available. But, this is Ghana.
When all is said and done, the most effective way
available to us to rid the registry of ghost names,
the genuinely dead and to a significant degree,
reduce the number of people who cross over our
borders to register, is to introduce what worked in
Nigeria beautifully: the Permanent Voter Card. In
Nigeria, when you take out the 100,000 cards that
were not ready before the March 28 poll, the use of
the PVC alone took out 10 million names from the
register!
CLEANING UP
The problem in Ghana, like Nigeria found out, is
with the database. This takes us to the other twin
to auditing: cleaning up. Nigeria used a two-phased
approach to achieve what has been described as one
of the most successful elections in Africa. Prof
Jega’s INEC first did an internal review process,
followed by an independent post-election audit
(after 2011), conducted by an independent committee
of election experts. After that he set about doing
two things: cleaning up and offering actual voters
an opportunity and/or the responsibility to come
forward to authenticate their existence and
eligibility on the voter list.
The result was that in between the last two
elections, some 18% of entries were effectively
deleted from Nigeria’s 73.5 million electoral
register. That will be equivalent to over 2.5
million names being deleted from Ghana’s current
register! Nigeria, it must be stressed, effectively
compiled a new register and updated it without
calling it so. And, it did so by simply introducing
the Permanent Voter Card. I will return to the
Nigerian experience later.
I remember asking Prof Attahiru Jega, the then INEC
Chairman when he visited Ghana on March 7, 2012, on
the invitation of IDEG, how come after
de-duplication, Nigeria’s biometric register rather
went up by six million names more than the
provisional figure. His simple but not-so-convincing
answer then was that the final list corresponded
with Nigeria’s census figures. But, deep down I
suspected he knew something was not right. He was
new to the job. He soon set about correcting it. His
initial clean up exercise only took out 680,000. For
the next four years he managed to clean up another 4
million or so to bring the list down to 68.8
million.
PVC
Then in October 2014, he introduced the PVC. The PVC
has an embedded chip that contains all the
biometrics of a legitimate holder (including
fingerprints and facial image). On Election Day, it
is swiped with a Smart Card Reader at the polling
station to ensure 100% authentication and
verification of the voter before he/she is allowed
to vote.
The exercise was effective because ghosts in Nigeria
could not make their way to the collecting centres
to hand in their old voter IDs, have their
fingerprints biometrically verified, their image
cross-checked, to pick up their new card, PVC. Also,
a law was passed to ensure that only voters who had
their PVCs were allowed to vote.
The impact in Nigeria was clear. 2015 was the most
competitive race in Nigeria and voter turn out was
expected to reflect this. The fact that total votes
cast saw a 25% reduction to 2011 was rather a truer
reflection of the situation; more a reflection of
the reality that the spiritual exercise of
resurrecting ghosts was not that effective this
year. Also rejected ballots reduced from 10% in 2011
to 1%!
NATIONAL ID
A non-contestable suggestion at the EC’s public
forum last week was the obvious point that Ghana
needs a single national identification source in
order to have a credible register. There too, Ghana
can learn from Nigeria. INEC, knowing it had very
little time left, introduced the PVC. Nigeria, after
the 2015 elections, has now set about the important
task of compiling data for a national identification
system, free from the undue pressures of election
considerations and ensuring that non-nationals stay
completely out of the electoral roll.
It is worth noting that the person who until
recently was in charge of Ghana’s National
Identification Authority and the issuance of the
Ghana Card, Dr William Ahadzie, is now the Director
of Research for the NDC. At last week’s forum,
seated right next to him was Sylvester Mensah, a
staffer at the Flagstaff House now, who until
recently was the CEO of the National Health
Insurance Authority. It was the NHIS that allowed
non-nationals, including international tourists,
access to NHIS cards.
The point really is that, whiles important, the
broader project of a national ID must be put on hold
and addressed in 2017, when Ghana turns 60 and
hopefully mature enough to do the right thing.
In conclusion, if the EC says it is not convinced it
needs a new register then let it do so
scientifically based on credible evidence. That can
only happen by first accepting the content of the
UNDP report and taking the requisite extra step to
commission an independent assessment of the
effectiveness of its exiting architecture and
security of the deployed biometric systems and their
proper alignment with the EC’s constitutional goal
of providing us a with a credible register for free
and fair elections.
If we are to have an audit it must mean just that:
an unbiased, independent, systematic examination and
evaluation of our biometric data to present a true
and fair view of the concern. If done properly it is
what should give stakeholders the opportunity to
effectively evaluate and take the follow-up measures
to improve the effectiveness of risk management,
control, and the governance process of our electoral
roll database, whether new or cleaned.
Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko
The author is the Founder of the
Danquah Institute, a public policy research centre.
gabby@danquahinstitute.org
November 02, 2015
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