This question is posed on behalf of Shahla Haque, Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan

How should party and candidate supporter lists be checked:

• Which principles should be take into consideration when checking candidate supporter lists?
• Is checking of thumbprints recommendable? 
• What is a suitable method for checking of supporters thumbprints?

Dear Shahla Haque,

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has dealt with te question in

Leonid Sinitsin v. Belarus, Communication No. 1047/2002, CCPR/C/88/D/1047/2002 (2006).  (7.3)

From personal experience, I would argue that the unrestricted presence of candidate/party agents and neutral observers offers the strongest safeguard against unjustified disqualification of signatures.

International IDEA's Guidelines for Analysing the Legal Framework for Elections, 2002, hold in pertinent part that:

Where the legal framework requires the support of a nomination by the collection of signatures, it should provide for a reasonable timeframe for this to be done and for the subsequent verification of the signatures.

Special attention should be given to the manner of validating signatures. An invalid signature should merely be what it is -- an invalid signature. It should not invalidate other signatures or the signature list. When signature collection is involved, registration should be based on verification of a fixed number of valid signatures without regard to the number or percentage of invalid signatures that may be on the registration list. The law should be very clear on the verification process involved in order to ensure that all party and candidate lists are exposed to the same level of scrutiny, under clearly stated objective criteria. Legal provisions to achieve this objective should include criteria, timelines and procedures and criteria for the vetting of signatures, which should allow the presence of party/candidate agents, as well as for a timely judicial appeal.

Provisions regarding the geographic regions where signatures are obtained must also be carefully reviewed. An election law may require that a party obtain a certain number of signatures in every region of the country. Such a provision discriminates against regional, ethnic and smaller parties that enjoy a strong public following but whose support is limited to a particular area. Further, any requirement that voters may only sign in support of one candidate or party can give rise to abuse of the registration process. Provisions regarding the process for appeal and the requirement for expedited court ruling -- adequate time must be permitted for correcting minor deficiencies before formally rejecting the nomination. The law should provide for appeal to a court of law after final rejection of registration. The law should clearly specify the process for appeal and require either an expedited court ruling to enable a candidate or party to be placed on the ballot where registration was improperly denied, or to allow the appellant to file an election petition after the election is concluded.

Hope this helps, Manuel

I'll leave the principles to others. But let me discuss the fingerprint issue. I'll use the term fingerprint, as a thumbprint is just another form of fingerprint.

How are you capturing the thumbprints? Using ink on paper? Electronically?

When you say "checking" do you mean that you will compare the fingerprint offered by the party/candidate with a fingerprint captured previously by the elections management body?

If you do, how and by whom will this comparison be conducted? Human beings? AFIS (or similar fingerprint matching technologies? 

Is the checking only to ensure that the person who's fingerprint is on the party or candidate supporters list? Or are you checking to ensure that this person has only been included on one party and one candidate supporter list (assuming that to be the legal limit)?

How much time do you have between (1) the capture of original fingerprint (for example during voter registration), (2) the capture of the fingerprint on the party supporter list; (3) the capture of the fingerprint on a candidate supporter list and (4) the checking of any fingerprint provided at (3) or (4)? 

Will all this processing and checking take place centrally, or do you need to do this at Provincial or District level? What is the scale of this effort? I note that you have eleven Presidential candidates - what other elections are being held at the same time? How many supporters (both of party and candidates) are you expecting to process?

As you can see - I have raised many questions. Depending on your answers to these, the discussion might take very different direction.

Some opinions (mine, and feel free to disagree!)

• Any use of ink on paper to capture fingerprints is very, very likely to result in low quality prints.
• Any use of ink on paper will almost certainly require scanning in order to bring fingerprints so captured into a system that will allow
  
• Low quality prints make the use of technology to scan these prints prone to problems, in this context, higher rates of false accept or false rejects.
  
• If a party or candidate is disqualified because of a false reject (i.e the system says that a supplied fingerprint does not match the one already in the system, despite both coming from the same person), you will have serious problems.
• If you are operating a paper-only system - where an ink-on-paper fingerprint is being compared with another ink-on-paper print, then the people doing the comparisons need to be highly skilled fingerprint analysts.
  
• If you cannot hire/train such people, then step back from manual fingerprint checking altogether. You cannot have an unskilled clerk simply compare a print on someone's ID card with that on a Party or Candidate list of supporters - this is unacceptable.
  
• If you're going with AFIS - then you'll have to ensure that you have previously captured all party supporters and candidate supporters (presumably during biometric voter registration).
• If you're going with AFIS you have to take steps to maximise the possible success of AFIS by capturing all fingerprints electronically. If you must use ink-on-paper, make sure this system is designed to maximise the quality of the captured print so that subsequent scanning into AFIS can offer low error rates.
• Your task gets more complex if you must use the fingerprint to both authenticate as well as ensure uniqueness in the data.

Without answers to the questions above, I would not say any more. I hope you get a chance to submit more information on your specific circumstances.

Ronan

As a person, who has handled the verification of the signatures of supporters in the nomination paper, I feel that it is practically not possible to verify the signatures or thumb prints of the supporters with in the short time available.  I have come across cases where same persons appearing in the supporters list of more than one candidate. Even in such cases it was not  possible to check whether the voter has signed the list for both the candidates or his signatures were forged in one or both the lists as these voters were residing in inaccessible areas; it may be that the candidates might have forged the signatures knowing that it would not be possible to verify the signatures. 

Thomas Mathew 

Dear Shahla,

I will go for the third question regarding the method of checking the finger print . in many cases when using the biometric data in the election to check these data, it needs were those details are kept before for example in the national index which is now used in many countries to help during election .these biometric data can be recorded during census or when renewing nationalities or passports  , but i guess in cases of our developing countries it can be a kind of difficult . During our referendum 2011 in South  sudan many  activist were arguing the possibilities of the disables who can not give a finger print because of their disabilities and by the way being a country which was in war for more than 5 decades these disables were not small in their number.

sometimes even the good capture of the finger print depends on the quality of the ink or method used to capture that finger print .

Hope my small contribution will help you to seek the appropriate method and ways to check the finger print according to the conditions and  facilities available in your country.

Dr Woda Jeremaih Jago

Consider the basic fingerprint as one biometric ID. Certain conservatives would never allow themselves to be fingerprinted by the government, because they are paranoid (perhaps justifiably), and so they would self-select OUT of voting, if fingerprinting were the preferred form of ID. Conservatives would never support voter ID that stood to disproportionately disenfranchise conservative voters.

So the ID has to be good (photo ID), but not too good (biometric ID). It needs to be losable (especially easy to do for something that only gets used once or twice a year), a burden to obtain for people without cars and bank accounts, and easily forged.

Nobody loses a fingerprint. Pass strong laws the prevent the use of voter fingerprints by law enforcement, and let us pass a voter ID law that can't be circumvented by a kid with a color laser printer and a laminating machine.

Which principles should be take into consideration when checking candidate supporter lists?

Candidate supporter lists should be checked against the details on the voters register.  Signatures should be compared with those on the registration forms.  It would be preferable to have scanned signatures of registered voters as one of the biometrics on the voters database for ease of retrieval and comparison.  This is to avoid impersonation when filling candidate supporter lists.

Checking of thumbprints is recommendable where the appropriate technology is in place otherwise using a naked eye may not yield accurate identification.

The suitable method for checking thumbprints would be to have fingerprints of voters in a database and when supporters fill the lists, the appended signatures are then scanned and matched against those in the database.

Técnicamente todo lo que tiene que ver con biometría, esta tan adelantado y probado que no es tan fácil encontrarse con fallas, en cuanto a la adquisición de las huellas y la posterior comprobación, así que no creo que esta parte tenga problemas

.

Los problemas aparecen en el cómo recaudar las huellas de los seguidores de partidos y grupos participativos, si no existe una metodología y un compromiso de que esto se haga para todos, es decir cada partido tiene su lista de adherentes almacenados en una base de datos  que incluye la huella (minucias e imágenes), si tiene dificultad posterior para identificarlos y saber de qué partido es seguidor.

Teniendo el anterior paso adelantado, es decir la adquisición de datos y huellas, y la comprobación del contenido, pues en cualquier momento es fácil comparar las huellas mediante sistemas locales o con una base de datos central de un sistema AFIS, también se puede demostrar la identidad, si se expide un documento que individualice  a la persona, el cual también es objeto de comprobación, entre documento, huella y base de datos.

Dear all,

Let me thanks from all your kindness and time for sharing your views and experiences regarding the questions what i have posted and sorry for not following the comments on time as was /am busy with our upcoming April election , meanwhile i wish all of your a very happy new year too .

In our electoral law there is only indicated  that the supporter list should have the name, voter card number and finger print (may some called it thumbprint as was collected the thumbprint) of the respective constituency , and the number is differ for each election like for presidential is 100,000 , we had 26 candidates , in the same time we have Provincial council election which 3056 candidates will contest for 458 seats , for collecting of supporters list 20 days were allocated but one week was allocated for launching , 12 days were allocated for verification of the candidates information including the supporter list.

There is no any voter list that each voter be connected to specific polling center , the thumbprint are not collected properly during the voter registration because there was different procedure within the 10 years which the  voter registration happened periodically prior each election, of course not a fresh registration and it was top up of the previous process, just to summaries there is no any comprehensive database to have the thumbprint of voters , the thumbprint in supporter list were collected manually in hard copy by using the simple ink pad by candidates, there is not a clear provision in electoral law that each voter should support one or more candidates , so comparing the thumbprint with other candidate list was not an option because it was not prohibited, the only provision was that the IEC made sure that a  candidate is supported once by a voter , BUT how? it was not practical  to check the thumbprint in around 7000 hard copy of each presidential candidate.We found it that the lack of clarity in electoral law and other electoral legislative is a big mass in term of checking the thumbprint.

I am expecting if any other country has the same situation ,what is their experience in this regard.

Thanks