The Electoral Commissions call for a new voters’ register has been explained in a clear cut presentation made to the Civil Society Organizations in a meeting last week.
Apart from the operational issues, challenges with the datacenter and network, the current system was not able to support the current and future demands of the Commission, the EC says.
This was contained in a presentation made by the Electoral Commission to the Civil Society Organizations.
Accroding to the EC it was a closed proprietary system that did not allow itself for upgrades.
With issues of cost a major factor too, a new voters’ register will save the nation more than a refurbishment.
Proposed cost for the refurbishment of the Data Centre is $15m while the cost of a new Data Centre will be $6m. The annual maintenance cost of the Data Centre is $4m while it will cost $1m to maintain a new one.
Therefore a whopping $12m would be saved.
In a presentation to the CSO’s, the EC said it appreciates the advantages of using government shared hosting services, however in this instance the hosting is not a viable option because; there would be unnecessary suspicion of government control if the EC kept its application servers in the government manage cloud or facility.
Also, saving the EC’s data in the public cloud is not an option for the Commission as the biometric matching servers are processor intensive and does not lend itself for being hosted in a virtualized environment.
The EC says one of the major challenges of the current system, BVR Kit is that it has been used since 2011 and many of its component parts had reach end of life and end of support.
It says a large quantity of the kits had many faulty component parts that were difficult to replace (keyboard, mouse, screen, camera).
The battery packs had worn out and therefore the decreased battery autonomy could not guarantee continuous use of the BVR among many other reasons.
See attached the full presentation of the EC to the Civil Society Organizations last Thursday.
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