Solving voter fraud and inaccuracies with a robust biometric voter registration system

Yemen has been facing problems with inaccurate voter registries due to duplicate, minor, and “ghost” voters. Thus, Yemen’s Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum (SCER) was on the lookout for a robust and effective voter registration system to mitigate the problems with their voter registry for their upcoming parliamentary and local elections, in collaboration with IFES (International Foundation for Electoral Systems).

A brief history

Initial voter registration in Yemen occurred in 1992. Out of approximately 6.9 million eligible voters, 2.7 million names were added to the voter list. This list was updated in 1996, at which point 1.9 million voters were added to it — a sharp 58% increase. However, this registration was met with several hiccups, primarily due to a drastic decrease in registration centers, which were down to a mere 301 centers in 1996 compared to 2,000 centers in 1992.

The voter list was again updated in 1999 and added roughly another million voters, making the total 5.6 million. Unfortunately, these registrations were done with many constraints, leading to several inaccuracies during data entry. It’s quite natural. After all, without an effective identification system in place, data entry errors in such high-pressure environments are quite common. Moreover, multiple allegations of duplicate registrations were made, both deliberate and accidental.

That being said, let’s look at some of the challenges faced by Yemen with its previous voter registration system.

Challenges faced with the previous voter registration system

As previously mentioned, the voter registration system previously used by Yemen was plagued with issues:

• Compiling, updating, and correcting the previous system’s voter register was difficult, time-consuming, and prone to mistakes.
• There was no way to detect duplicate registrations within the system.
• While the registry underwent several changes to clean up the lists, these lacked audit trails.

How Yemen overcame voter registration issues with M2SYS

After a thorough investigation, Yemen’s Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum (SCER), in collaboration with the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), selected M2SYS’s Voter Registration System to help minimize electoral disputes, boost the legitimacy of the voting process, and increase the public’s confidence in Yemen’s democratic institutions.

The new biometric voter registration (BVR) system in Yemen has many noteworthy characteristics, some of the highlighted ones are:

• The ability to register and match biometric templates for facial recognition, iris, finger vein, palm vein, and fingerprint modalities.
• Overall 14 million voters were targeted for registering under this BVR system.
• Yemen’s BVR database included 84 million fingerprint templates (6 fingerprint templates from each individual) and 14 million facial photos saved in its central database, all of which underwent thorough and robust de-duplication.
• The host application included essential modules like demographic information, biometric data capture, user and role management, and biometric device management.

Using the reliable and flexible Voter Registration System, one of the many eGovernance solutions provided by M2YS eGov, governments and election authorities can carry out a wide range of actions, including processing, editing, searching, retrieving, and storing voter biometric templates and data. With M2SYS Voter Registration System, a nationwide database of verified voter data can be created using biometrics and various tools to manage and maintain it, thus speeding up data collection and card issuance in the process. The M2SYS Voter Registration System has helped reduce voter fraud, eliminate ghost voters and inaccuracies, and ensure a fair and credible voting environment.

M2SYS provides robust biometric solutions for both governments and enterprises

M2SYS has been working with governments and enterprises for over 20 years. This system provides end-to-end turnkey solutions for accurate identification and verification. Whether pension management systems, voter registration systems, biometric employee time clock solutions, or prison management systems, M2SYS has done all that and more! All biometric software solutions are highly customizable to fit any biometric project and are versatile enough to work with all the popular biometric hardware and software solutions available.

Contact us now to learn how M2SYS can help your biometric projects with its end-to-end turnkey solutions.