IMANI petitions CHRAJ to investigate EC’s disposal of election-related equipment

This follows the EC’s disposal and auctioning of some equipment it described as obsolete.

He indicated that they believed such conduct amounted to “misappropriation”, “wastage”, and “misuse” of said resources, adding “At a time when the nation cannot service its debts and is in the midst of a tight IMF-supervised fiscal regime, such egregious conduct cannot be tolerated.”

Mr Cudjoe said the petition lamented that the EC’s conduct in the premature retirement and eventual disposal of tens of thousands of laptops, digital cameras, printers, scanners, and fingerprint verifiers, has been motivated by a conflict between its duties under various laws to judiciously apply the resources of the country for the good of the citizenry, on the one hand, and its tendency to take decisions favourable to various commercial vendors and transactors, on the other hand.

“Furthermore, we stated our belief that the EC’s most recent conduct has been necessitated by a need to curtail transparency and accountability, and thus was motivated by a collective conflict of interest and potential corruption

“We asserted our longstanding claim that the EC’s electoral equipment is a portfolio of multiple items, bought and refurbished at different intervals between 2011 and 2019

Franklin Cudjoe added that some of the devices cost more than $3000 each, and together are worth tens of millions of dollars.

Mr Cudjoe opined that the equipment in question contained sensitive voter information, including polling records and biometric data, that could be reassembled for nefarious purposes by devious actors to harm citizens and/or undermine Ghana’s public elections in some shape or fashion.