Making Elephants out of Ants – Election 2012 and the Limits of Constructive Imagination

The recent statement of support from the Catholic Bishops Conference for the addition of a verification system to the biometric voters register has reignited considerable debate, largely along partisan lines. While the NDC, via the statements by its Secretary General is opposed to the addition of the verification system, the NPP is strongly supporting it. In all this debate, I am yet to see a technically informed opinion on the subject. The NDC debunks the feasibility of a verification system on the grounds that we do not have the infrastructure to support it, but I see no hard evidence of a) what technology do we really need for the verification system, and b) what infrastructural backbone is required to support the deployment and use of the equipment required to make the system work. Without these basic parameters for the arguments, we are indeed, engaging in fruitless emotional battles fraught with unfounded speculations and meaningless accusations and counters. The debate is thereby reduced to the typical misdirected Ghanaian intellectualism where we waste tons of time arguing over issues without any shred of hard evidence to support our case.

Beyond that, I find it extremely perplexing and hard to comprehend why we Ghanaians are so adept at deploying our imaginative powers to concoct, sometimes, very grotesque scenarios about any issue in order to persuade ourselves to remain where we are – backward, poor, and helpless. While we indulge in this intellectual and political mediocrity, others elsewhere would use their imaginative powers on precisely the same kinds of scenarios to create new opportunities, products, services, standards, and what have you that make us admire them as developed people. And it is not as if we are incapable of constructive thinking. We are. It’s only that we are negatively constructive i.e. we indulge in the negativism because somehow we benefit from the status quo and are blinded from seeing the greater possibilities ahead of us.

But before my rage at our great tendencies as a nation to engage in analysis that cause us paralysis (what I call paralytic analysis), let me return to the issue of the verification of the identity of voters who will be registered under the biometric system at the polling station, come election time in 2012. The main argument that the NDC Secretary General has put up is that we do not have the infrastructure for support a verification system. If by this he meant we do not have the technology that would link verification equipment in remote polling stations to a server somewhere that holds the database against which the identify of a potential voter might be verified, I say he’s got it all wrong. Do we really need internet connectivity to make verification work? My answer is no, as I shall explain shortly.

Let us start with my layman’s view of how a verification system should or would work. In my considered layman’s opinion, we do not need more than a laptop preloaded with the data for every polling station for make the onsite voter verification system work. In other words, rather print tons of paper worth of voters’ registers for every polling station the biometric information collected at the time of registration will be preloaded onto laptops, one laptop for each polling station. Hence, instead of the EC struggling to transport tons of paper of voters’ registers across the length and breadth of the country, the Polling Officials will simply show up with a laptop that has the information of all the people registered in that particular polling station. All the Polling station officials would need to do is swipe the voter registration card (if the swiping mechanisms is available) or simply type the number on the voter ID Card into the computer and the verification data for the person, complete with picture identification should pop up for the officials and party agents to see and verify. Once the verification is done, the rest is known. The software should be designed so that no ID number can be used more than once. A swiping mechanism will be ideal, so that the physical presence of a voter ID becomes necessary for the verification to be done.

If the concern is about electricity to power the equipment that will be used for the verification, let’s start the discussions then from the basics. What type of equipment do we need and how much power do they require? For this kind of system to work, I am convinced that we do not need more than a good laptop with a long battery life to make electronic verification work at each polling station. This is where the question of electricity comes in.

To deal with it, let’s do a bit of math here. For all our elections, voting starts at 0700 am and ends at 5 pm. Exceptionally, the EC sometimes extends voting time to 18:00 hours (i.e. 6 pm) to enable people who are in the queue by 5 pm but have not yet voted to do so. Assuming this time extension is factored in, then we have a total of 11 hours for which the electronic verification equipment will be required to run (i.e. from 0700 to 18:00 hours). So is the power problem necessarily an insurmountable obstacle? Absolutely not!

First, there are laptops that come with high-capacity six to twelve cell batteries that can run from 12 to 14.5 hours or more on a single full charge. This means that, even with conventional laptops, we have the technology already to satisfy the power needs. Plus, there is technology available now that power laptops using solar power sources to provide unlimited and uninterrupted power supply for extended periods of time beyond the 14.5 hours initial run time on single charge. In fact, South Africa was scheduled to start marketing the Samsung NC215S Netbook that comes complete with its own in-built solar panel for continuous recharging and work. The product was to be launched in the South African market from mid-September 2011 at a recommended retail price US$493 (see http://www.mediaclubsouthafrica.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2542:netbook-060911&catid=48:innovationnews&Itemid=115#ixzz1dxOsjMnC). Hence, with the abundant sunshine that coincides with our voting period throughout the country, absence of power from a grid is not an excuse. And for redundancy, we can always charge up a couple of car batteries to provide backup. With simply DC to AC inverters that cost next to nothing, we’d have the needed backup, just in case.

How about costs, one may ask? Well, the EC says it needs about US$20 million extra to be able to add the verification system to the biometric voters’ register (see http://www.dailyguideghana.com/?p=29377). Without questioning the basis of their computations, with the current 21,004 polling stations that the country has, we would need a little over ten million US Dollars (exactly US$ 10,354,972) for the procurement of the Samsung Laptop models above. Even if we increased the number of polling stations to 21,500 to accommodate population increases and other needs, we would still need only US$10,599,500 for the purchase of the laptops. Add freight and all other charges and I would bet we would still come up under US$15 million for procurement of these laptops. This is without counting potential discounts for bulk purchases, plus the possibilities of direct sourcing from Samsung Corporation or other vendors that can give us real value for money for the same quality or better for this kind of product. And if we deduct the cost reductions that will come with the elimination of the paper registers, the net incremental cost for introducing the database for the verification system should be less than anticipated.

For the process itself, commercial card reading devices are already in the market and I would bet that we could very easily procure some at less than US$50 each that can be configured to read our biometric voter I.D cards. So, the technology is available and is affordable. What seems to be lacking is the will to do the right thing by the people of Ghana.

In brief, the Catholic Bishops are absolutely right that the EC must do everything to add verification to the biometric system. The Government needs to do what needs to be done by making the money available, and the EC must do what is right by Ghanaians. No excuses exist. Both Government and the EC must remember that they have a duty to act constructively in the interest of the nation, instead of imagining excuses. There are no excuses.

Let’s get thinking about how to solve the perceived challenges instead of hiding behind imagined problems and challenges just so that we can remain in the age of darkness. All Ghanaians must demand this right to have a more transparent system of voting. It is our right, not a privilege the EC or the Government can decide to give or not to give us. We deserve better.

By: Hippolyt Pul, Independent Political Analyst