Innovatrics Provides Biometric Election Registry for Guinea

Innovatrics has outfitted Guinea with a biometric electoral register. The Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) of Guinea will use the database to ensure that each citizen only votes once in the country’s parliamentary elections.

The announcement comes only six months after Innovatrics first secured its contract with Guinea. The company provided Guinea with all of the biometric hardware, software, and training needed to enroll new voters and maintain its elections system. It also helped the country consolidate its new biometric register with its pre-existing voter records.

To that end, Innovatrics installed software on 4,000 enrollment kits, which were used to register 5.5 million Guinean voters at eight regional centers. Those 5.5 million voters were then blended with the 6 million voters in CENI’s legacy system to create the biometric register.

Innovatrics used face and fingerprint recognition to tag any duplicates when the two databases were consolidated. Roughly 170,000 convicts and deceased individuals were similarly removed from roster of eligible voters, while facial recognition was used to identify an additional 60,000 enrollees who were still under age.

“A specially trained neural network detects the age of the enrollees based on their faces,” said Innovatrics Head of Delivery and Solutions Matus Kapusta. “If they are obviously underage, it sorts them out for rechecking.”

While many voters were flagged as ineligible, none of the data was deleted in the interest of transparency. The CENI system meets the standards of the International Election Observation Mission, and can be audited at any time. HP Enterprise provided the central servers needed to support the system.

The news comes as more and more state and local governments are turning to biometrics in an effort to facilitate safer elections. Several Florida counties have adopted BIO-key technology for internal security, while the Commission on Elections in the Philippines has made several pushes to register more voters in its biometric database. India’s Election Commission is also trying to link someone’s voter ID card to their Aadhaar number. 

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April 6, 2020 – by Eric Weiss