Ghana using GenKey biometric voter verification solution for third consecutive election

GenKey announced that for the third consecutive municipal election, more than 16 million Ghanaians will visit polling stations facilitated by the company’s biometric verification technology to vote for their next president.

The country’s Electoral Commission first deployed GenKey’s biometric technology to register and verify voters in the 2012 general election, marking the first time biometric technology has ever been used to verify voters identities on an election day.

Three years later, the Electoral Commission again used GenKey’s biometric solution, this time to deliver Ghana’s municipal elections.

Once again, GenKey has partnered with Ghana-based contractor SuperTech Limited (STL) to deploy the biometric verification process.

No other country in the world has deployed biometrics at such scale in three successive elections, making Ghana’s 2016 general election a significant milestone for the biometrics industry as a whole.

“Ghana is setting the standard for biometric voter verification in terms of scale and frequency,” GenKey CEO Michiel van der Veen said. “The fact that Ghana has done it successfully three times in a row demonstrates that the right biometric technology, deployed in the right way, can deliver reliable and sustainable voter verification on election day. It’s proof that biometric elections work.”

In many sub-Saharan African countries, a lack of official ID documentation makes it difficult to accurately verify the identity of voters, which only increases the risk of voter fraud on election day.

For this reason, Africa has become a global leader in biometric elections, in which fingerprints and other biometric data are used to register and authorize voters.

More than 25 sub-Saharan African countries to date have held elections using biometric technology.

GenKey’s biometric verification devices (BVDs) not only authorize a voter’s identity, they can also transmit the voter tally from each polling station to the electoral commission.

“At GenKey, we believe that biometric identity is the key to unlocking a range of basic civil rights and freedoms, including the right to democratic elections,” Michiel van der Veen said. “Ghana has proved that biometric elections can be successful. And the more this technology is trusted, the more it can be used to deliver peaceful, open and fair elections in Africa and beyond.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  elections  |  GenKey  |  Ghana  |  voter identification