Impact of biometric verification

While dropping the broadest hint yet that electronic voting machines (EVMs) and biometric verification machines will probably not be used in the 2018 general elections, the country’s poll supervisory body has counted some of the glitches that prevent it from operating these machines in the election process. For instance, the voting machines failed to read the fingerprints of up to 12 per cent of the voters in the recently concluded by-election in Lahore’s NA-120 constituency.

Such glitches are not uncommon and countries using biometric voter identification systems and electronic vote transmission have routinely encountered these hiccups — triggering costly delays in the voting process. It is good to remember that since the biometric system is still in its infancy in the case of Pakistan’s elections and as the technology built around it is also evolving we should persist with it instead of abandoning it altogether. The ECP could perhaps use electronic voting machines in one-third of the constituencies as opposed to the whole country.

By next year the number of voters in Pakistan is expected to reach the figure of 100 million and, as pointed out by the ECP secretary, any defect in the EVMs would cast a long shadow on the vote result. These defects, according to him, would probably hurt the most in rural constituencies where chances of technology breakdowns and human errors are greater than in urban constituencies.

Since its introduction in the US in the 1960s, electronic voting began first with punch card ballots, gradually moving on to optic marks-sense ballots and then direct-recording electronic voting machines — each with its own set of glitches. These days we are in the era of remote voting machines where developed countries allow their voters to send in their vote via the internet from any part of the globe. In the times to come we hope our voters and our election authorities would see the advantage of biometric verification — but before that we would need to identify a trustworthy base for secure EVMs.

The Express Tribune