Ghana’s Electoral Commission is Putting its Faith in Mobile Technology
How the West African country is setting the pace in how to make elections pandemic-proof
Donald Trump is working overtime to control mail-in voting in the United States.
Depending on what side of the political divide you belong to, the president is either doing his best to save America’s democracy or using everything at his disposal to win a second term.
It’s election season in many other parts of Africa as well, countries like Ethiopia, Guinea, Mali and Sudan have all been forced to postpone their polls, but in Ghana, mobile technology is being used to make local elections pandemic-proof.
Pioneers
The Ghanaian Electoral Commission has introduced a digital queue management system; voters are now able to book registration appointments from the comfort of their homes.
The goal is to reduce overcrowding at registration centres, thereby lessening the likelihood of voter registration becoming a super spreader event.
For Ghanaian voters, the options are registration via USSD or registration through PanaBIOS, the African Union-built application for biosurveillance and bio-screening.
Ghana is the first country to adopt PanaBIOS, and there are indications that voter registration will not be its only use case.
Or Crash Dummies?
As with any innovation, however, expecting a fail-proof, first-time implementation will be expecting too much.
There are concerns around the security of the information system, around the technology performing suboptimally and, especially if the Commission extends the experiment to the voting process proper, around the issue of trust.
Circling back to Trump, he just doesn’t trust the process — that’s fair, but the problem is that he hasn’t put as much energy into identifying a solution as he has in identifying the problem — Ghana has.
For the sake of an election process that’s historically been one of the smoothest in Africa, let’s hope that Ghanaian voters have as much faith in the technology as their Commission seems to.
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