News
Biometrics for Civil ID
April 2012 by Chris Trytten, Director, Developer Product Marketing at DigitalPersona, Inc.
In emerging countries across the world, Civil ID programs are taking shape. For these countries, growth, prosperity and political stability depend on providing burgeoning populations with access to basic services, such as pensions, entitlements, education, banking, as well as secure voting systems. Unlike developed countries, emerging nations often lack an identity infrastructure, making it imperative that identifying and authenticating an individual be easy and resistant to fraud. Because other forms of identity such as personal identification numbers (PINs) or identity cards can be faked, shared, lost or stolen, they are less desirable, as they are susceptible to rampant fraud.
When looking for Civil ID solutions, governments of emerging countries face two critical questions. First, how do you establish citizen identity for whole populations? Second, once identity is established, how do you ensure citizens requesting services are who they say they are, and are therefore entitled to access a service? Fingerprint biometrics has quickly become a key part of establishing and authenticating identity.
Biometrics and National Elections
For emerging countries, enrolling citizens to enforce a one-person, one-vote system is of supreme importance. Without this basic guarantee of fairness, election results are rejected more often than not, resulting in civil unrest. There are an increasing number of instances where fingerprint biometrics has had a transformational impact on the electoral process.
Fingerprint biometrics has had a positive impact on the Nigerian election process. Though Nigeria became a democracy through a presidential election in 1999, balloting remained challenged by voting irregularities. Voter registration lists, developed over the last decade, were full of names of dead and fictitious people. Precincts that had few voters sometimes were reporting a 100 percent turnout in highly-contested local elections. To avoid a repeat, in the weeks and months leading up to Nigeria’s April 2011 elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) conducted a program to register all eligible citizens in Africa’s most populous country.
To do so, INEC put out a bid for 132,000 Direct Data Capture (DDC) machines using fingerprint sensors to support voter registration. With the solutions in place, INEC of Nigeria embarked on an ambitious voter registration program. On January 15, 2011, INEC began registering all of its voters for the April general election, making it the first voter registration initiative of this scale and sophistication. All told, 73 million voters across the 36 states and Abuja were successfully registered in time for the election, and the election was deemed a success by previously critical independent observers. Key to this effort was establishing and verifying identity, quickly and simply, through fingerprint biometrics.
Setting the Stage for the Future of Nations
Biometrics is a portable identity for citizens that can be reused in many other programs in both the public and private sectors. Delivering services such as entitlements, banking and voting brings points-of- service access to rural populations in a cost-effective, reliable and secure way. Many countries are now fingerprinting their entire population in anticipation of using biometric databases for a wide range of civil and commercial programs.
DigitalPersona is exhibiting at Infosecurity Europe 2012, the No. 1 industry event in Europe held on 24th – 26th April 2012 at the prestigious venue of Earl’s Court, London. The event provides an unrivalled free education programme, exhibitors showcasing new and emerging technologies and offering practical and professional expertise. For further information please visit www.infosec.co.uk
