Biometric Scanning To Verify Voters?

Biometric technology could be used to identify voters at the ballot box without requiring Muslim women to remove facial veils, but setting up a nation-wide system would be expensive and risks disenfranchising many electors. The same kind of fingerprint readers or iris scanners employed in some airports to identify pre-screened frequent fliers could be used to quickly confirm the identity of voters and prevent fraud at the ballot box. The problem with biometric authentication is the time-consuming and expensive process of "enrolling" potential voters in the system. Participants first have to be "scanned" to create baseline data to which their fingerprints or irises will be compared at the polling station. "Something that people often underestimate is the cost of doing that enrolment," said Steven Kent, a Massachusetts-based expert on identity authentication. "Whenever we talk about making changes, we have to realize there is a tremendous start-up cost." Once captured, a voter's biometric data could then be stored on a so-called smart card or in a central database. Voters would present the smart card at a polling station and a machine would scan their irises or fingerprints to electronically match against the information stored on the card. Or, the voter's biometric data could be compared against the reference data in a database, but that would require a stable electronic connection between the polling station and the database.