Biometric Voter Registration Adds Credibility to Municipal and Parliamentary Elections

Situation

In order to modernize Burkina Faso’s electoral process, the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI) made the commitment to ensure voter identity. As part of this commitment, CENI identified the need for a highly secure biometric solution that would enable Burkina Faso’s election authorities the ability to generate a trustworthy list of eligible voters.

Challenges

For this project, Innovatrics needed to overcome the following challenges:

• Time Constraints – Innovatrics had 4 weeks to deliver the final voter list free of multiple registrations because of the high cost and political impact of re-scheduling an election.
• Accuracy – A large portion of the voter population are in rural areas, resulting in a high- percentage of low quality fingerprint records. This required the deduplication effort to be highly accurate.
• Reliability – Because of concerns around the reliability of stable power service, Innovatrics had to be prepared for potential blackouts that could delay the process.
• Security – The data had to be backed up at all times. Furthermore, the customer required that any servers housing the voter could not be accessed from an outside network.

Our Solution

In fewer than three months, Innovatrics with its partner Gemalto, delivered an end-to-end biometric enrollment & deduplication solution and trained a staff of 300 (who would later train 7,000 field agents). As part of this rollout and training, 4.4 million Burkina Faso citizens were enrolled and 45 thousand duplicates were identified.

Result

Burkina Faso’s Independent National Electoral Commission succeeded at generating a biometrically verified National Electoral Registry for the Parliamentary and Municipal Elections of December 2012. WebAFIS Deduplication Service enabled CENI to achieve its goal of building a trusted, secure biometric voter list in time for the next elections. Innovatrics was able to process 4.4 million citizens enrolled in 4 weeks and cleared 45 thousand duplicates. The voter list was recognized by every stakeholder including competing parties. The Elections were celebrated on time and with full satisfaction of the project.