The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has claimed that the central servers where all the data from the biometric voter registration (BVR) process will be stored is hack-proof. The commission also said that the data will be stored in tamper-proof flash drives temporarily before the data is transferred to the servers.
ZEC Commissioner Qhubani Moyo said:
(First) the information is collected from the field and it saved into tamper-proof flash drives. The machines themselves are embedded with USB storage as backup storage.
All the information will be consolidated into one server which is located at Zec offices (in Harare).
At this server, we will use the Central Automated Finger Identification System (AFIS) which will weed out people who have registered more than once, to leave us with a clean voters’ roll. The clean data will be stored in the final server at our head office.
This comes after sections of the media raised concerns that the data could be compromised by hackers as ZEC had contracted a third party company to provide the central server. Laxton Group Limited which is supplying the BVR kits also raised the same concern saying:
This is a highly alarming risk. Zec does not appear to have this infrastructure in place and when Laxton raised this issue, it fell on deaf ears.
It was also made clear that Zec intends using an alternative company to provide the central system, which was even more alarming.
If issues arise, it is virtually impossible to know who is accountable. With multiple parties handling the system, then who is responsible if an issue arises? It will make it too easy to point fingers at each other.
More: Daily News