Electoral commissioner says no to bio-metric system

By JEFFREY ELAPA
A BIO-METRIC voting system cannot be implemented in time for this year’s general election, Electoral Commissioner Andrew Trawen said.
Such a system needed five years to be bedded in to operate without errors.
Trawen said an electronic counting system could not be introduced for this year’s elections because of a lack of funds.
He reiterated that the general election would go ahead as required with the issue of writs on April 27. Election day is on June 23.
Preparations are on schedule and the commission is confident of delivering a free, fair and safe election in June.
He said a bio-metric system would require a whole new enrolment exercise to be conducted nationwide as it needed photographs and fingerprints of voters.
The electoral roll also had to be accurate for the bio-metric system to be introduced.
“These ideas have been around for over a decade. We have considered them and will come up with a system that is workable for PNG,” Trawen said.
“Biometrics and other technologies have major risks and the biggest risk is trust.
 “Who is to trust people who claim that they can solve our electoral roll problems as it is easy to manipulate and control the outcome of an election through such technology?” Trawen said.
He said there was a need to use technology to assist in elections but this must be trialled first.
Opportunities for abuse and manipulation of such a system had
to be eliminated.
Trawen said the team of experts from the Unique Identification Authority of India had strongly recommended that the unique identification card system which has been approved by the National Executive Council should be trialled before it was implemented nationwide.
Voters also needed to be educated to understand the purpose of UID.
He said it would cost between K5 and K10 to register each voter into such a system.