Disposal of obsolete BVDs: Proper audit of the machines was needed – Franklin Cudjoe

Founding President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe has said that the Electoral Commission (EC) should have done a proper audit of the biometric verification devices (BVDs) that went missing but were discovered.

To him, the commission threw away perfectly working machines in 2020 and spent almost 150 million dollars on new ones

” There should’ve been a proper audit of the machines,” he said on the Ghana Tonight show on TV3 Monday, April 30.

In an earlier statement issued by IMANI Africa, the policy think tank said that the statement issued by the Electoral Commission on the discovery of 10 obsolete BVDs at a recycling company in Madina, was full of lies, half-truths, and pure fantasies.

The Commission had indicated that these devices were legally auctioned and had been acquired before the 2012 elections.

In a statement released on April 27, 2024, IMANI Africa questioned the EC’s claims, particularly the number of BVDs auctioned off and the disposal of the remaining devices.

EC’s statement on obsolete BVDs discovery full of lies, half-truths and pure fantasies – IMANI

“The EC’s press statement was full of lies, half-truths, and pure fantasies. The EC says that only 10 biometric verification devices (BVDs) were “auctioned”. And that they ‘found their way’ into a recycling plant. 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?”