What is Biometric Voting System? A Definitive Guide

An election is a fundamental part of democratic governance. Royal houses time has gone and now people demand a cabinet who will be elected by the people and accountable to them for their performance. Election has to be fair and peaceful. If the opposite happens, people lose their democratic rights and freedom of expression.

Biometric Voting System
Biometric Voting System

Unfortunately, “election engineering” is a notorious term currently in many countries. The result of many general elections around the world is suspicious and there could be something wrong. The election commissions are looking for a solution that could be a solution to this problem.

To fight with this problem some countries choose biometric voting system. Biometric technology is trending everywhere in this world as it is capable of identifying every person separately. Therefore, nobody can vote multiple times for a candidate and change the voting result.

What is Biometric Voting System?

Biometric is a technology that works with the biological traits of the human, such as fingerprint, palm vein, iris, face recognition etc. It is a technology of measuring, analyzing and recognizing the biological data to identify a person.

Biometric technology can improve the security and ensure the accurate data. It works with the latest scientific method that makes it one of the most booming technology at this moment. This technology is highly used in many countries in many aspects like border control, banking, institutions, business etc.

So, the biometric voting system is the uses of biometrics in a voting system. Some countries like Ghana, Zimbabwe already applied this technology in the election of their country.

How Biometric Voting System Works?

The biometric voter registration system works in several steps. At first, the authority will keep the numbers of an individual’s national identity card like national ID, driving license or passport.

Then they will collect biometric data such as fingerprint or iris. If fingerprint, then the individual will press their fingers on a fingerprint scanner. If iris technology, they will use a camera to capture the iris data and create a particular template for that person.

The data of biometric voter registration system will be transferred to a centralized database that will be used to identify voters by their biological data.

Why Biometric Voting System

With the advent of technology, people are more connected with electronic gadgets than ever before. The security concern is also uprising amid the people and they want the best security system.

In the traditional system, polling agents count the votes and let people know the result. But, there is a huge chance of changing the data with that system and may political parties claim this after participating in an election.

With the modern biometric voting system, it is quite impossible to edit the data manually. It also provides an instant result and saves time and money both.

Specially, in developing countries, it is a common culture that political parties are blaming each other for engineering the voting data. This kind of solution looks like a must adopt solution for them.

Advantages of Biometric Voting System

The key advantages of Biometric Voting System are following:

  1. Eliminate Invalid votes: It eliminates the chance of any invalid votes by verifying every individual’s data respectively.
  2. Save Time: Biometric technology in voting saves time, because polling agents don’t need to count the votes manually that reduces the timing of polling and save a huge time. Some biometric voting system companies offer instant result with highly accurate data.
  3. Save Money: BVR or biometric voting registration saves your money in the long run. Once the voters’ biometric database is created, it can be used every time by just adding the new voters’ information.
  4. Security: A biometric voting system is more secure than the traditional voting system. Some voter registration systems allow audit trail that ensure the security of a vote.
  5. Credibility: In today’s society, the whole world closely keeps their eyes on almost every general election in any corner of the world. So, the use of biometric will increase the credibility of a voting system to the world.
  6. User-friendly: the Most biometric voter registration system is user-friendly and easy to understand. Developers think about all levels of people when they create the system.

Biometric voting system is still its beginning phase. More and more countries will adopt this technology in near future and we will see a new era of voting system.

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