Announcement:

The public may find a copy of the petition here: My colleagues and I at IMANI have been gravely concerned by the Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana’s handling of the nation’s scarce resources in the discharge of its duties, which conduct we believe amounts to “misappropriation”, “wastage”, and “misuse” of said resources. [...] In our petition, we lamented that the EC’s conduct in the premature retirement and eventual disposal of tens of thousands of laptops, digital cameras, printers, scanners, and fingerprint verifiers, has been motivated by a conflict between its duties under various laws to judiciously apply the resources of this country for the good of the citizenry, on the one hand, and its tendency to take decisio. [...] For ease of reference, we shall list the principal elements of the biometric and computing components of this technological infrastructure and adopt the EC’s term for referring to them collectively as the BVMS (Biometric Voter Management System) in the rest of this document. [...] Supported by the government of the day, the EC in 2020 proceeded to procure a new BVMS, including tens of thousands of BVDs and thousands of BVRs, at great cost to the nation, instead of replacing components of the BVRs that may be faulty beyond repair, or genuinely unserviceable, and BVDs that were faulty beyond repair or genuinely unserviceable, as the Electoral Commission has done in times past. [...] We posit that the EC’s approach to disposing of these electoral items was partly dictated by a need to suppress inventory records and to evade accountability, in light of the spirited campaign by civil society activists in 2020 to debunk the EC’s claims that the equipment in question all date from 2011, and are therefore obsolete, and partly by a need to facilitate undue commercial profiteering by.