Innovatrics Delivers Top-Performing Biometric Registry for Guinea Elections

BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA — 27 March, 2020 — Innovatrics, the leading provider of multimodal biometric technology, is proud to announce the deployment of a biometric electoral register for the Guinea parliamentary elections in record time despite numerous challenges. In just six months since winning the tender, all the necessary hardware has been delivered, enrollment officers have been trained, the biometric enrollment has been finalized, and the data has been consolidated, making them ready for voter list and card printing. The whole solution is built upon the sole aim of securing exactly one vote to all eligible citizens of Guinea.

It only took Innovatrics three months to provide the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) with the biometric registry solution and set it up to import  the old data from the legacy system. In cooperation with HP Enterprise, Innovatrics has secured the necessary central servers to run the whole system smoothly and efficiently.

Crucially, Innovatrics has also created software for the enrollment stations to securely obtain biometric data from the citizens. Moreover, it oversaw the installation of the software on 4000 enrollment kits and initialized all of them. This also meant training more than 600 supervisors, prefectoral coordinators, maintenance technicians, and CENI officials to ensure that the data is obtained accordingly. During the enrollment phase of the project, Innovatrics provided support in 8 regional centers, consolidated the data at the regional level, and secured the transfer of the consolidated data to the central server.

During the enrollment process, the system registered 5.5 million voters, 6 million records were migrated from the legacy system. In the consolidation phase, the top-performing biometric face recognition and fingerprint algorithms removed duplicates to prevent multiple voting. The CENI operators also tagged the deceased and the convicted as ineligible to vote. Overall, almost 170 thousand such records have been selected and removed from the electoral register.

After checking for duplicates to prevent possible fraud, the photos in the registry were also analyzed by the AI, searching for underage enrollees. “A specially trained neural network detects the age of the enrollees based on their faces. If they are obviously underage, it sorts them out for rechecking,” explained Matus Kapusta, Innovatrics Head of Delivery and Solutions, who oversees the whole Guinea project. Almost 60 thousand of such records have been found.

No data has been deleted from the registry, as the records were only tagged as ineligible to vote. This is done in order to uphold the full transparency of the system, which is open for audit any time. This happened with the recent audit that recommended putting aside 2.5 million voters without any supporting document. In the end, the International Election Observation Mission affirmed that the ballot fulfilled international standards in electoral matters.

About Innovatrics

Innovatrics is an independent, trusted partner for biometric identity management technology. The company has completed more than 500 projects in 80 countries with over a billion people having been biometrically processed using Innovatrics software. The award-winning Innovatrics algorithms provide best-in-class speed and accuracy for projects of all sizes and guarantee the highest level of performance. For more information, please visit www.innovatrics.com

PR Contact

Ján Záborský, jan.zaborsky@innovatrics.com, +421 903 322 872