The biggest drives for this proposal hinge on a need to help citizens to preserve a national card as well as a crucial urge for the Electoral Commission to cut cost.

The idea for a the new card is coming from the Department of Operations and Management Information Systems at the University of Ghana Business School. That’s my school.

My lunch time experience of a student starts the conversation. Water accidentally spilled on my voter ID card which lay on the table. The colour began to wash off and an attempt to blot the card made things even worse.

This has been my experience. However, I doubt that the quality of my card will be any different from the over twelve million others being used by Ghanaians and needing replacement when they’re damaged so easily as happened in my case.

The Electoral Commission has spent millions of the tax payer’s money to print voter ID cards.

Some of these costs could be reduced if the current voter ID card was improved to be durable and much more robust rather than just a piece of laminated paper.
 

In fact, other countries have better ID cards. The Ghana voter ID card is only a piece of paper that has been laminated but of course the recent ID card is far better than the previous ones. In spite of this, there could have been vast improvement on the recent one designed for the biometric registration in 2012. 

Another interesting thing is that the current voter ID card looks more like the property of the Electoral Commission than of the Republic of Ghana. The “Electoral Commission of Ghana” is boldly printed on it and the country of origin becoming an “adjunct” text of sorts.

National ID cards from Nigeria, states in USA, and the Philippines have either the name of the republic or nation on them and the cards from PVC and not ordinary paper. Does it hurt to have first have “THE REPUBLIC OF GHANA” followed by “ELECTORAL COMMISSION OF GHANA”?
 

Voter ID cards are held with great care and priced in every nation. It is the number one ID that is most trusted and used to verify peoples identities. Here in Ghana, one needs the voter ID not only for voting but for creating accounts with the bank, redrawing money among others.


The worry

It seems to me that the current ID card can so easily be faked! Any wayside graphic designer can click a few buttons on the computer and generate it.
 

Leveraging on current technology I have printed a prototype of what Ghana’s ideal ID card should be on quality PVC material. This should help curtail issues of voter ID cards getting destroyed and the electoral commission spending huge sums of money to replace those ID cards.

One will argue that PVC cards can also be destroyed but at least it lasts longer than a piece of laminated paper.

Do you know what the banks do with an open cheque? For an open cheque, all a bank asks for is an ID card and since the voter ID card is the easiest to redesign one can just do that to cash other people’s open cheques.

One can also create fake accounts with fake aliases with the banks and mobile money services. There is also a possibility of people scamming others through this vulnerability of the voter’s card assuming individuals recreate voter ID card and register for a mobile money account with fake aliases.

People easily scam others online and even use fake IDs to register on the e-commerce sites making e-commerce lose its credibility among some sections of society. 

In my proposed ID card design, “AGE” has been changed to “DATE OF BIRTH”. “Age” does not communicate enough information assuming a 30-year-old man presenting his voter ID card has “26” printed on it as his age. Ideally, the country has to consider integrating all the ID cards.

In our hope to improve as a nation, we must start from somewhere. Even though it is a long shot it is time Ghana, as a country tried to integrate all ID cards in order for each individual to have a unique number that can be traced to them as the case is in developed countries.

I have started working on a design for a system that will better the voting process of not only institutions or the nation but the African continent as a whole.

It is time academia started to lead the country and industry in innovation rather than industry leading academia.