Voting practices have fallen under increasing scrutiny over the past few election cycles. As the public calls for greater transparency and governments push for higher participation, digital technologies have emerged as potential solutions. Biometric voter registration holds promise as a way to address several concerns.
How Does Biometric Voter Registration Work?
Biometric registration uses data like fingerprints or face scans to register and later identify voters. When someone first registers to vote, they scan their face or fingerprints into a secure government database. When it comes time to cast their ballot, the same system can re-scan them to verify they are who they say they are.
At least 51 nations use biometrics at polling stations to some degree. That includes the U.S., where national policies don’t dictate such a solution, but many state and local bodies do.
Across all these use cases, biometric voting serves largely as an anti-fraud measure. The technology can replace older authentication methods, such as driver’s license-based verification, to improve security, speed, and convenience. Still, the practice has its fair share of critics, so it’s important to understand both sides of the issue.
Benefits of Biometric Voter Registration
The growing popularity of biometric registration is more than just excitement about new technology. Implementing this kind of system has several advantages.
Lower Voter Fraud Risk
The most straightforward benefit of biometric voter registration is that it fights fraud. Biometrics are a fairly reliable way to authenticate someone’s identity. Customs and Border Protection has already used them to stop over 100 attempted passengers trying to pass as someone else on flights.
Applying the same protection to voter registration systems could help produce fairer elections. Voter fraud’s prevalence is a matter of widespread debate. However, ensuring only eligible people vote and that each person does so only once is important regardless of how common fraud may be.
Biometric scans are far harder to falsify than physical IDs. As a result, they may provide greater assurance that an election’s outcome is fair.
Easier Election Processes
Biometrics are also fast. While the speed of authentication is less critical than accuracy, it’s still impactful, especially in this context, where convenience can affect democracy.
Getting voters in and out of polling locations faster gives more people a chance to vote before stations close. Using fast on-site verification methods can also break down conventional barriers to registration. Nearly 29 million voting-age Americans lack a driver’s license, and 7 million of these have no other form of valid government ID, stopping them from voting.
It’s worth noting that historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are the most likely to lack conventional IDs. Consequently, switching to a biometric system could make registration and verification more accessible and equitable. It’d be easier to sign up as a voter and to vote, particularly in underserved communities.
Encouraging Higher Voter Turnout
As biometrics make voting easier, more equitable, and less fraud-prone, they could encourage participation. While voter turnouts have risen recently, just over half of eligible voters participate in U.S. presidential elections. As a result, the outcomes may not reflect what Americans actually feel and believe across the board.
Citizens may not vote for several reasons, including fraud concerns, not having the time, and facing obstacles related to conventional IDs. In addressing these concerns, biometric voting could drive greater participation.
The more people vote in an election, the fairer the results are. A larger pool reflects a greater portion of the American public, so driving higher turnout is crucial to the success of the democratic system.
Downsides to Biometric Voter Registration
At the same time, biometric registration has some significant potential pitfalls. Lawmakers should consider these downsides alongside the benefits to inform safer and fairer voting regulations.
Cybersecurity Shortcomings
One of the biggest challenges of any biometric system is that, unlike passwords, biometrics are unchangeable. A cybercriminal could steal voters’ face or fingerprint scans from a government database and use them to access other resources. Affected victims could not lock them out by changing their credentials in such a scenario.
These concerns are more than merely theoretical. In 2024, cybersecurity researchers found that criminals stole more than $40,000 from a single victim by stealing their facial recognition data and using it to withdraw funds from their bank.
A nationwide biometric database would need extensive security to ensure no such breaches happen. That would be challenging considering how large these datasets would be, as they’d be prominent targets.
Surveillance Concerns
Government-related privacy breaches raise ethical questions. Some people may be uncomfortable with the prospect of giving the government access to their face or fingerprint ID. When authorities hold so much information, worries about how they might use it grow.
Ethically dubious government uses of biometric data have already arisen in some areas. The Taliban has begun using biometrics to find potential opponents within Afghanistan, including arresting a judge attempting to flee the country and coming to the homes of former government officials’ families.
The use of biometrics as voter registration may be harmless in and of itself. However, agencies can easily use the resulting data for potentially unethical purposes down the road.
Technical Issues
Biometric scans’ technical reliability also deserves consideration. While fingerprint and facial recognition are largely accurate, they’re imperfect. They can still produce errors, which could have significant social implications when they’re verifying someone’s eligibility to vote.
Facial recognition is often less accurate when identifying people of color than those with lighter skin tones. Consequently, a biometric registration system may incorrectly say a Black voter is not who they say they are, barring them from voting. Situations like this could counteract any equity benefits of using the technology.
Technological advancements can assuage some worries here. Generative artificial intelligence can generate faces with certain complexions to train facial recognition models to overcome biases without jeopardizing anyone’s privacy in training datasets. However, progress will still take time.
Biometric Registration Is Promising but Faces Challenges
As it stands today, biometric voter registration may face too many ethical questions and technological shortcomings to implement on a large scale. Using it alongside alternative verification methods or creating a plan for more reliable, safe usage could help it get to where it needs to be. Until then, though, it remains a promising but imperfect solution.
