Pakistan is taking a very tentative step into biometric polling with an upcoming by-election. The Election Commission of Pakistan is introducing biometric voting machines for use as a pilot project in the Haripur NA-19 constituency for its August 16th by-election.
The ECP’s approach is a cautious one. All electoral candidates and parties have been consulted to obtain their consent about the program and to help them to train staff on how to discuss it with voters, and in a press release the ECP asserted that the use of biometric polling would follow a ‘principle of evolution’ rather than ‘revolution (sudden change)’. Nevertheless, the efforts due point to potential long-term planning on how to implement the technology on a wider basis.
The move both echoes and contrasts efforts currently underway in the Philippines, where voter biometrics are being collected for registration in anticipation of a national election next year. That country is implementing biometric voting very quickly and on a much larger scale, but at the same time its election agency’s approach has been very proactive in ensuring that citizens understand how the new voting process is going to work, reassuring them about the safety of their data, and generally crossing all T’s and dotting every i.
For its part, Pakistan has so far demonstrated interest in biometric technology in other government activities, both in security efforts and in more innocuous administrative deployments, so it would not be surprising to see this biometric polling project expand beyond this initial pilot project.
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August 13, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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