EC Press: Facial Recognition Feature as part of the voter registration exercise

The Electoral Commission has issued a press release on issues relating to Facial Recognition Feature as part of the voter registration exercise.

Below is the full press release by the EC  dated 16th July 2020.

Full release on Facial Recognition Feature 

Our attention has been drawn to an article making rounds on social media seeking to cast doubts about the existence of the Facial Recognition Feature as part of the Voters Registration Exercise.

It is obvious that the writer has a lack of understanding of technology. We wish to assure the General Public that as part of the Voters Registration Excercise, the Commission is capturing both fingerprints and faces of Applicants. As such, Applicants will be verified using their fingerprints and or faces.

For the benefit of the General Public, facial recognition is not solely a function of the hardware equipment that is employed. It is used with the facial recognition software that drives the process.  “Specialised 3D Hardware is NOT required for facial recognition.”

The Electoral Commission has deployed the Facial Recognition Technology in the registration application. The software and hardware being used have been selected to ensure the pictures captured meet the ICAO requirements.

READ: EC registers over 7 million voters onto new voters register in 16 days

Indeed, under the current registration exercise, we have recorded instances where identical twins with unique fingerprints have been flagged as duplicates by the Registration Software. If there was no Facial Recognition feature this would not have been possible.

ALSO READ: 63 duplicate Voter ID numbers identified in EC data

Another way to confirm that the Facial Recognition Technology has been deployed is that Applicants who registered as Face Only Applicants can have their registration records retrieved for updates by taking their pictures. That is Facial Recognition at work.