Verification Failures: Assessing the Sample Quality of Fingerprints collected in an African Election Setting

Abstract

The use of biometric technology has become an integral part of elections in Africa, the primary aim being delivery of credible elections. Fingerprint verification of eligible voters is central to this development. Deployment of fingerprint verification technology at elections has not been without its challenges for African countries. Failed verification incidents have been recorded in countries like Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. A case is made on the need to identify the causes of these incidents before any reasonable solution can be proposed. This research investigates some of the possible causes by analysing the quality of sample fingerprints from a new dataset of an African population collected in election settings. NIST’s NFIQ 2.2 was used for the fingerprint quality assessment with initial analyses reported in this work.