Iris ID to provide iris recognition solution for African nation’s electoral process

Iris ID announced that the government of an unnamed African nation has selected its iris recognition solution, IrisAccelerator, to help create a fraud-free voter registration list and ultimately guarantee a fair 2015 national elections.

The country’s election commission is responsible for completing a voter registration list in time for this year’s national elections. Currently, about 1.2 million residents of the country’s 3.5 million total residents are registered to vote.

The commission was originally planning on using a fingerprint biometrics solution for registration, but after factoring in research and input from international election consultants, it decided to select IrisAccelerator for its ability to accurately detect duplicate registration attempts and its speed of enrollment.

In a trial program performed last year, the election commission found the Iris ID technology was able to accurately identify 457 instances of duplicate registrations seeded into a base of 1,062 registrations. Additionally, the technology also showed a high speed of enrollment.

Roy Dalle Vedove, an international elections specialist and election commission consultant, said that the Iris ID solution provided the required high quality to obtain good biometric data, as well as reduced the enrollment time by half compared to fingerprint registration, and lowered labor costs.

“That speed is significant in an environment where the elections provide an immutable deadline,” Vedove said. “And we completed the process with high quality data enrollment that proved the iris matching would definitely identify attempts at duplicate registration.”

“This is the first time iris recognition technology has been selected for voter registration and its adoption is now spreading widely,” said Mohammed Murad, vice president, global sales and business development for Iris ID. “The Iris ID system provides this country with one of the most sophisticated registration systems in Africa – really in the world.”

Article Topics

Africa  |  biometric authentication  |  biometrics  |  deduplication  |  elections  |  Iris ID  |  iris recognition  |  voter registration