The
Progressive People's Party (PPP), in the Monday edition of the Daily
Graphic, called for the adoption of an electronic voting system to be
introduced into the 2016 general elections.
According to the
party, the E-voting (Electronic voting) will help avoid any challenges
associated with elections and also avert the problems that the country
faced during the 2012 general elections.
Addressing the issue at a
two-day IEA Post-Election Workshop held at Akosombo, Eastern Region,
the PPP National Secretary, Mr. Kofi Asamoah-Siaw argued that "full
electronic voting would remove the need for an elaborate pink sheet,
reduce the large numbers of temporary staff recruited by the Electoral
Commission (EC); remove the transportation of electoral materials and
the unacceptably large numbers of spoilt ballot which effectively
disenfranchise about 251,000 voters in the last election."
But
speaking in an interview with Radio Gold, Kwesi Pratt Jnr,
Editor-in-Chief of the Insight newspaper, has warned the nation not to
ignore the manual system of voting.
Though he did not entirely
kick against the E-voting proposal, he however was of a strong view that
the E-voting can be successful when the manual system of voting in the
nation is fully in place.
According to him, the manual voting
serves as a complement to the E-voting and would help check any
irregularities that may occur in the voting process.
He asserted
that the "Firstly, there is the element of cost. E-voting cannot be less
expensive than manual voting because in all cases where E-voting is
done, manual voting is done in addition. And in fact, in systems where
E-voting is used, when they do the auditing of votes; they use the
manual voting to check whether or not there have been errors in the
E-voting process.
“You recall that in the Venezuelan election,
the opposition was not too happy with the result and so on, because the
opposition maintained that electronic voting could be rigged…” |
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