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National Organizer of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Kofi Adams has cautioned the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) not to create unnecessary tension about the Electoral Commission’s mock registration with the upgraded biometric machines.

According to him, the dummy registration is only meant to test the effectiveness of the machines under different reactions and not meant to capture data of the people into the register for the November polls in 2016.

Director of Elections for the New Patriotic Party, Martin Adjei Mensa Korsah has raised concerns about the upgraded biometric registration kits which the Electoral Commission wants to use for pilot exercise on March 12, 2016 in all the ten regions.

Speaking on Okay Fm’s 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show, Martin Adjei Mensah indicated that the demonstration of the supposed upgraded biometric machines did not provide samples but kept the data in the machines.

He added this will not help to ascertain the effectiveness of the machines as to whether they can print out the names of the voters correctly; bemoaning the representatives of the parties were not allow to ask questions except to observe the process.

But Kofi Adams on the same political platform responded that this is only but a mock registration which is not intended to register names of the people who undergo the exercise as raised by the NPP.

He maintained that the exercise with the upgraded registration kits is to find their effectiveness or otherwise so that they can be addressed at the IPAC meeting before the machines are used for the limited registration and the November polls.

“This is dummy registration to test the machines to check for their effectiveness and also to see if the kits are faulty and need rectification before they take for the limited registration. This is exercise is not really meant to capture people’s data; it is to test for the machines’ strength under different conditions for a long time without failure”, he explained.

He went on to suggest however that “if the political parties want, they can decide not to send polling agents to observe the pilot exercise; it is needless but they can decide to send people to see whether the machines work effectively or not. I don’t think the print out of the sample is the key in this pilot exercise; I think we are good to go”.

Touching on the selected polling stations for the pilot, Kofi Adams disagreed with Martin Adjei Mensah Korsah’s assertion that they are inadequate for effective results; reiterating that if 2000 sample size be used to draw a conclusion of a survey on 27 million population, then it is equally effective to use 20 polling stations out of the 29,000 polling stations to get accurate results.