While technology could be an important tool to reduce costs and improve sustainability, the danger for EMBs, electoral assistance providers and donors is that they become hostages to vendors, who have been known to opt for technological solutions which might not be standard compliant, suitable, cost effective and/or sustainable for the partner country in the long run.
An important issue is also whether the system proposed by the vendors is a proprietary system, where the security encryption algorithms or other methods used by the vendor to maintain a commercially competitive advantage are protected by the suppliers contract and thus render it impossible for the EMB or any other relevant Government body to “move” suppliers once the system has been established. In such cases, complex matters of intellectual property rights can arise, resulting in issues as to who “owns” and controls the databases that are created by the use of the technology.
It is important to remember also that the “depreciation costs” are high in terms of the equipment procured and are aggravated by a failure to properly store and look after the equipment. In this context, it is convenient to study, at the identification/formulation stage, the institutional context of a given country, its capacities and the potential and synergies ICTs can offer.
Another risk is the failure of the whole system due to the low quality of the collected voters’ data, failure of equipment before data has been retrieved, or mistakes in its processing during the registration updating, which can jeopardise the significant investments made in the technology. Thus, a careful feasibility and sustainability analysis covering the whole electoral cycle should be made before embarking on large scale support to “medium or high-tech” solutions.
Currently UNDP is experiencing a strong interest from African countries such as Benin, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, Togo, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, DRC and Nigeria in the procurement of ‘high-tech biometric voter registration kits’. The systems need to gather data via so called “mobile biometric or ID registration kits”. In general terms these kits have all of the hardware and software needed to identify eligible voters and issue them with either the voters’ cards or a proof of registration on the spot. All the components of the kits are contained in an ergonomic robust case and are:
UNDP and the EC have, in last the five years, acquired a lot of experience in support of biometric voter registration processes via the different projects implemented or in the process of being implemented, such as in the Portuguese-speaking African and Asian Countries, DRC, Togo, Guinea, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Zambia, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire and Cambodia, etc.
From a technical point of view, experience demonstrates that it may be sound to separate the supply of the biometric registration kits from the supply of the AFIS system, for the specific reason to have the fingerprint images and the templates meet standards that are industry-wide compliant, therefore not making one country hostage to a specific vendor and at the same time, ensuring long term sustainability. If a single vendor has provided both the biometric kits and the AFIS system, nobody can check the quality of the biometric data captured.
Afghanistan example time line to establish a 15 millions fingerprint Biometric solution from the Vendor after contract with UNDP was signed
