The Electoral Commission (EC) in a 28-page document, has reiterated its justification for the decision to create a new voters’ register.

In the document cited by Myjoyonline, the Commission listed 36 challenges facing the current Biometric Voters’ Management System (BVMS).

Among these, according to the document, is the absence of “checks and balances in the System to determine if some records were missing” including the fact that “none of the EC IT staff were trained on the BVMS.” 

The document continued that: “The EC was completely reliant on the vendor for the Management of the System” and, “the BVMS application modules were built by different vendors and were poorly documented,” among many others.

The Commission further states that the hardware components of the BVMS cannot be upgraded as those against the decision to publish a new voters’ register are suggesting.

Should the EC go-ahead to acquire new components without changing the software, the system might crash, the election management body argued in the document.

Meanwhile, the Commission said it does not intend to discard all previous data; rather “the EC intends to use the existing data of voters during the registration of voters into the new voters’ register.”

This means the existing voters’ register would not have to have to go through the same processes as the new one.

“Their data will be retrieved from the existing database and their biometrics captured i.e. new facial image and 10 fingerprints.”

The Commission also indicated that compiling the new register will save the nation some Ȼ173,077,650.00.

There is more in the document attached: