By Tahna Weston
Damani Tabor, the United Progressive Party’s (UPP’s) public relations officer, said the explanation from the Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission (ABEC) as to what transpired regarding the technical connectivity issues which affected a number of its registration units is inadequate.
At present there is an expired voter identification card replacement drive underway in all 17 constituencies, which commenced on August 12.
The UPP had issued a statement on the matter on August 15, in response to ABEC’s press release outlining that 13 of its 17 registration units were offline after encountering difficulty with its system.
However, by Thursday about 12:30pm ABEC said 16 of the units had been restored, with Barbuda being the only one still experiencing problems.
The party expressed and still maintains “deep dissatisfaction with the implementation of this important process” just four days into the programme.
“We need to know what exactly transpired and how can they guarantee it won’t occur again?” Tabor said.
“For example, do they need to build greater redundancy into the system, so instead of one data or connection supplier, however they set it up, because there must be redundancy, there must be robustness to systems as important as voter registration.”
Redundancy is a system design in which a component is duplicated so if it fails there will be a backup.
Tabor continued, “But it just points to an overall failure to effectively use technology in this country. Whatever the case is, they need to make amendments because you ask your provider to build in more redundancy, go to a higher service level, there are things that can be done. But again we need to use technology properly in this country to serve the people.”
Meanwhile, every effort is still being made to get the registration unit in Barbuda up and running as it remains the sole unit still being plagued with technical connectivity issues.
ABEC’s Public Relations Officer Elisa Graham said the Commission is working earnestly with its service provider (Flow) on Barbuda to have the unit there functional.
Technicians were expected to travel to the sister island yesterday to make further assessments of the situation.
However, due to unforeseen issues, this trip has now been rescheduled for Sunday.
“Unfortunately, the trip over to Barbuda did not happen because there were some technical issues with the plane. It would have been done by the Defence Force and there were some technical issues there, so plans have been made for Sunday morning via CalvinAir,” Graham said.
ABEC said, in spite of the problems, more than 1,350people have applied to replace their voter ID cards during this first week.
