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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