Ghana’s Electoral Commission (EC) says the upcoming December 7, general elections will still conducted if the recent internet outage nationwide is not solved by then.
The Director of Electoral Services at EC, Dr Serebour Quaicoe noted in an interview with Citi News monitored by Peacefmonline.com that the internet disruptions will not affect the process in any way.
“On election day, everything is manual, reading does not use the internet. Voting is done, basically without e-voting. People are given ballot papers they go and thumbprints. That has nothing to do with the internet, when the results are counted, it has nothing to do with the internet.”
“The officers will physically send the results to the collation centres, and the results will be collated manually on the access sheet, which has no internet connectivity,” he assured.
His assurance follows clarification from the National Communication Authority (NCA) that all four (4) subsea cables from Ghana to Europe through Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal are out of service – the reason for the nationwide internet outage.
Many fear the situation will affect the electoral processes but Dr Serebour Quaicoe says the EC operates manually during election days without the internet.
“When they finish at the constituency, they will send the result to the regional office, no internet usage. The region will also do the collation just using the computer without internet connectivity.
“When they finish, they will send the results through a fax machine to the head office. Then the head office will also do the collation and announce the results. So, the election day has nothing to do with internet connectivity.”
“Except the exhibition time and registration time where we use our…routers and other things from MTN and other providers, we use their facilities, but that is not internet-based.
“It’s just normal data that we’ll use. Once we don’t have any issues with data, we can do the registration through our network data centre and the rest, and we’ll complete the system.
“And on the day of the exhibition, we collect on our database. We don’t use the external internet. So, I don’t think it will have any effect on our registration or exhibition.” He said.
Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com/ghana
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