Preparing for a biometric election next year, the Electoral Commission of Ghana is making room for a margin of error. The EC has decided that traditional, manual voter verification will play a role in the election process.
Biometrics will still play the primary role in voter verification. In a meeting of an Inter-Party Advisory Committee, it was decided that voters will still be authenticated via biometrics, as originally planned, but in the event that registered voters experience technical difficulties with the biometric scanning, traditional authentication methods may be used. It’s a failsafe intended to ensure that everyone gets to vote, even in cases where biometric authentication isn’t possible, and in that sense it could be instructive to the Philippines’ Commission on Elections, which has struggled with issues related to voters’ registration of biometric data ahead of 2016 elections in that country.
This won’t be the country’s first experiment with biometric voting. Earlier this year, its District Level Elections used biometric technology provided by GenKey—a company with some expertise in this area—to authenticate voters’ identities. But next year’s elections will be an expansion in scale, offering the benefits of greater security and integrity in the country’s electoral process to an even greater degree.
Source: STARR FM
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December 23, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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