This perspective written by Marielle Debos is published by Democracy in Africa (DIA). Here is an excerpt:

Biometric voting is booming in Africa. Since the mid-2000s, election management bodies have increasingly turned to biometric voter registration. 28 countries on the continent now use biometrics to generate voter rolls. A select few countries –  Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda – also use biometric voter authentication on polling day. While most countries use fingerprinting, technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated: in 2017, Somaliland was the first country to use iris recognition for an election.

While biometrics has raised expectations among political opponents, they do not automatically prevent rigging. Biometric voter registration strengthens the reliability of the voter roll by preventing multiple registration, but it does not affect many other fraudulent strategies.

Election technologies can even be counterproductive by creating black boxes that are inaccessible to citizens, reinforcing election commissions’ dependency on support from donors and foreign experts. In a nutshell, biometric voting is not only a waste of money: it has troubling implications for democracy.

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