A member of the opposition New Patriotic Party’s [NPP] Communication Team, Kwabena Sarpong, has asked the Electoral Commission [EC] to suspend the biometric voter registration if it is not adequately prepared for the exercise. Speaking on Minority Caucus, a political talk show on Multi TV, Mr. Sarpong faulted the EC’s decision to simultaneously organise the biometric voter registration in two regions indicating that it is not the best of decisions. “I think this is not good; this thing is not good, because if we are going to register in tots and we want verification to be added to it, are we going to do the verification in tots also, are we going to vote in tots?” he questioned. According to him, the EC must be pressurised to organize the biometric registration simultaneously across the country and not two regions at a time. “The pressure must be put on the EC, that if you want to do the biometric registration, we go and do all the 22,000 polling stations at once, after all if you buy the 22,000 computers, when we finish we go and give the computers to schools. So if we buy 22,000 computers and use it for the registration, when we finish it serves the purpose. So why don’t we want to do that.” The NPP Communications Team Member said if the EC claims it cannot afford to buy the equipment needed for the biometric registration, then, it should consider borrowing the equipment from other African countries like Nigeria. “If we cannot buy the equipment, Nigeria has 70,000 pieces of equipment” he noted. “People have come to Ghana to borrow our electoral materials to go and do their elections, why can’t we borrow from Nigeria?” he queried? He thus called on the EC to use the manual voter’s register for the 2012 polls and suspend the biometric registration for use in 2016. “If I have my way, I will say let them stop. If they cannot do it fully, let them start in 2013, the government that comes in, gives EC the money to do biometric registration and they try it on the District Assembly elections so that if there are any problems, we iron it out for the 2016 elections” he argued. Mr. Sarpong thus charged the EC to convince the government to give it the required money to implement the verification system and simultaneously conduct the registration across the country. Commenting on the recent criticisms against the EC by the NPP, Mr. Sarpong said the criticisms were in the interest of the EC to ensure that they conduct their duties openly and in a fair manner.