Ukraine mulls biometric voter verification for Members of Parliament

UDAR suggests taking fingerprints of MPs (forUm) "A new voting system, which reads fingerprints of MPs must be introduced in the Parliament, deputy leader of the UDAR Party faction Vitali Kovalchuk said on the sidelines of the Verkhovna Rada, ForUm correspondent reports."

Piecing this together from a couple of places at http://en.for-ua.com. The main story linked above is very short. There is also a photo gallery of the event where the press was invited to witness "the working of the voting system 'Rada-4'".

I took the above photo from that gallery. Is that an optical fingerprint reader illuminating the hand in the photo?

If so, and I realize I'm piling speculation atop a mere suggestion, it would mark an interesting development in the administration of legislative bodies. 

The São Paulo City Council instituted a biometric time and attendance system, but I'm not aware of a biometric system used in a legislative body to ensure that the person casting a vote is a member and that the member in question isn't going around to all the empty desks and voting in the place of his absent colleagues. 

African democracy: Sierra Leone and Ghana

Sierra Leone and Ghana: Setting a New Template for African Elections? (Think Africa Press) Though "mature" Ghana and "fragile" Sierra Leone are rarely compared in terms of their democracies, their elections followed notably similar trends. One of these trends was biometric voter registration. Ghana took it a step further with biometric voter verification.

Ghana: Day before election, the focus is on politics

Ghana: Election Fever Grips the Nation (All Africa)

On the day before Ghana's sixth presidential election, the issue of the biometric voter system has faded into the background and the issues that more typically surround elections have come to the forefront.

The Electoral Commission, the biometric system vendor, Ghanaian citizens in general and citizens of other aspiring democracies will certainly be hoping that continues to be the case over the next few days.

Are Democracies Ungovernable without ID?

A Powerful Argument from India

Get over the identity crisis (Daily Pioneer)

The Supreme Court should immediately take Aadhaar under its purview and set an independent body to examine the project's feasibility. The Aadhaar card should be made every citizen's constitutional right

Electoral Biometrics: Kenya & Zimbabwe

There we're quite a few interesting developments in the world of biometrics yesterday that I didn't get a chance to highlight here...

Two of them have to do with biometric elections in Africa. First, it looks like the on-again-off-again biometric voter roll for Kenya may be on again. If it is, you'll certainly see more on the matter here. If you need a chance to catch up on the saga,  here's our most recent post on the subject.

Meanwhile there's considerable interest in applying biometric technology to voter registration in Zimbabwe. Other Zimbabwe posts are here. Biometric voter systems have a lot to recommend them, especially in young democracies or those with a civil society emerging as a potent force capable of holding governments responsive to the rule of law. Zimbabwe's democracy problems don't seem to be the kind that are solved with information technology.

Population-Level ID Management

Biometrics offer a leap-frogging opportunities for countries to learn about their own populations. In the same way that the cell phone revolution propelled African countries into a more interconnected world at a fraction of the cost of a land-line network, biometrics offer opportunities for emerging democracies to develop the ID infrastructure that elections depend upon at a lower cost than older democracies had to bear.

Ghana: Census figures must be published now (The Statesman)

The compilation of a new voter register will surely ensure multiple registration is avoided and will lead to a further enhancement of Ghana’s electoral process.

In 2008, the rig-sayers were helped by the admission on the part of the Electoral Commissioner that the voter register was massively bloated. Ghana, with a population of less than 23 million people, said it had a voter population of some 10 million.

Not only does a bloated register give political parties the opportunity to rig elections, they also give rig-sayers the legitimacy to say to their supporters and sympathisers that they have been cheated and that they should stand up and resist – whether the claim is true or false. This is what characterised the 2008 general elections in Ghana