Iraq to begin biometric registration for 2M eligible voters April 30

Iraqi authorities will on Thursday begin biometric capture for about two million citizens who are eligible to vote in the country’s next general elections.

Following a decision of the Iraq Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), the eligible potential voters were recently added to the election database as part of an update launched last year in preparation for parliamentary elections.

Shafag News reports that the move is in line with government efforts to increase the size of the electorate which is now estimated at 29 million people. Notwithstanding, about nine million more eligible citizens are reported to still be excluded from the database, and the government continues its push to make the country’s electoral process more inclusive.

Those newly added were born between 2008 and 2010, and they’ll be issued voter ID cards once their registration is completed with biometric capture, officials say.

Ahead of parliamentary election in November last year, over 1.85 million new registrants were issued biometric cards, which brought the number of eligible voters at the time to over 21 million, according to Rudaw. For the same election, IHEC also introduced facial recognition for voter verification as an alternative for failure of fingerprint scans.

Efforts to update and expand Iraq’s electoral database come as the country is also fully engaged in driving its digital transformation agenda. The government says there’s been progress in the last few years in a number of areas including connectivity, which reached 84 percent in 2024, up from 44 percent five years earlier.

Iraq has also made progress in national digital ID coverage, with 40 million of them issued as of last year, a milestone the ID supplier Veridos celebrated in January 2025.

The country’s overall digital adoption rate is estimated at 90 percent with more than 800 government services already digitized or in the process of being done.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  elections  |  identity verification  |  Iraq  |  voter registration