The Electoral Advisory Committee (EAC) is to recommend to Parliament this month, the introduction of electronic identification of voters by fingerprint in future general and local government elections.

All seven members of the EAC have signed off on the recommendation, a reliable source, who declined to be identified, told the Observer.

The recommendation is included in a report in which the EAC says that the local government election held on June 16, 2003 saw the successful implementation of a pilot project using electronic equipment to identify electors by fingerprints and to issue the ballot in the constituency of St Andrew Eastern.
The test run was done in the Papine and Mona divisions of East St Andrew during last year's local government polls.

The Electoral Office of Jamaica (EOJ) claimed success after the test run, which produced an average turnaround time of only one minute after identification. The computerised system delivers a ballot to the prospective voter only after his/her fingerprint has been identified from the electronic database.

At the time, EAC chairman Professor Errol Miller, and Director of Elections Danville Walker, who both witnessed the test run, expressed satisfaction.
Miller said that the system performed well under pressure, as it had been tested with large numbers of people participating from across the entire constituency of 20,000 electors.

In its report to Parliament the EAC says:
"The success of the pilot project has caused the Electoral Advisory Committee to seek to implement this system (of) Electronic Voter Identification and Ballot Issuing System 'EVIBIS' as a standard electoral procedure in parliamentary elections and local government elections. This EVIBIS system will be used whenever the Electoral Advisory Committee deems necessary."

Consequently, the committee was recommending that the existing legislations (section 34 of the Representation of the People Act, section 50 of the KSAC Act, and section 28 of the Parish Council Act) be amended to provide for the use of the system of electronic identification of electors by fingerprint matching and to issue the ballot in all constituencies and electoral divisions.

The electronic identification of voters - and ultimately electronic voting - was first mooted in the early 1990s as part of a package of reforms aimed at reducing voting fraud in Jamaica.
The use of an electronic system for identifying voters was possible because the voter registration process demands the taking of fingerprints, storing them in a computer and then cross-matching them so as to eliminate duplicates and weed out potential fraudsters, the authorites said.

The general prerequisite of the system is that the elector is required to comply with the instruction of the presiding officer for verification of identity by fingerprint matching, through the use of the prescribed equipment, in order to be issued a ballot paper.
If no matching fingerprint is found, the elector is then required to answer questions generated by the computer from the elector's demographic record contained in the database which, along with the photograph, are to be used as an alternative identification procedure.

In cases where the equipment fails to function or to function properly, the elector is required to take an oath of identity and otherwise establish his/her identity to the satisfaction of the presiding officer.
The elector will be required to place his/her finger in the equipment for the purpose of identifying his/her fingerprint. If he/she refuses to comply, erasing lines will be drawn through his/her name on the official list and in the poll book, and the words: "refused to be identified by fingerprint" entered.
No elector will be allowed to obtain a ballot paper or be permitted to vote without placing his/her finger in the equipment provided for identification and without being identified by the equipment as the person whose name appears on the official list of electors.

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