Guinea updates voter roll with Innovatrics biometrics in just six months

A biometric electoral register has been deployed for upcoming Guinea parliamentary elections with Innovatrics technology and support applied to meet numerous challenges, the company has announced.

Innovatrics completed the project just six months after winning the tender, which the company says is record time. Necessary hardware was delivered, enrollment officers trained, biometric enrollment finalized, and data consolidated to make the voter list ready for card printing.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) of Guinea was provided with the biometric registry solution, and the system was configured by Innovatrics to import data from the legacy, in only three months. Innovatrics worked with HP Enterprise to secure the central servers for running the system, and created software for the enrollment stations to securely collect biometric data from Guinea citizens. The company oversaw the installation and initialization of the software on 4,000 enrollment kits. More than 600 supervisors, prefectural coordinators, maintenance technicians, and CENI officials were trained for the process, and Innovatrics provided support in eight regional centers, consolidated data at the regional level, and secured its transfer to the central server.

The enrollment process registered 5.5 million voters and migrated 6 million records from the legacy system. Top-performing facial recognition and fingerprint biometric algorithms were used to deduplicate the data, and CENI operators tagged deceased and convicted individuals for removal, reducing the total by 170,000. AI age estimation software then checked the photos in the registry to identify possible underage enrollees.

“A specially trained neural network detects the age of the enrollees based on their faces. If they are obviously underage, it sorts them out for rechecking,” explains Innovatrics’ Head of Delivery and Solutions Matus Kapusta, who oversees the Guinea project. The process found 60,000 underage people included in the electoral roll.

Records tagged as ineligible voters were not deleted, but simply removed from the voters list.

An International Election Observation Mission has affirmed that international standards have been upheld, according to the announcement.

Guinea’s National Agency for Social & Economic Inclusion (ANIES) signed up Idemia to help efficiently register recipients’ biometrics for a welfare program last year.

Article Topics

Africa  |  age verification  |  biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  fingerprint biometrics  |  Guinea  |  Innovatrics  |  voter registration