Bad times for fake voters! Facial recognition technology piloted in Telangana polls

Facial recognition technology, which was recently tested in Telangana Municipal polls on a pilot basis, has met with 65 to 86 per cent success rate and no glitches were reported in the experiment. The experiment was conducted by the Telangana Election Commission in the polls held on January 22. Voters who cast their votes in the election were clicked in the green room and their photographs were matched with the photos on their voter ID cards as part of the experiment. The Commission undertook the measure to check the efficacy of an additional check to weed out fake voters. However, no voters were barred from the poll process in case of the software’s failure, the Indian Express reported.

An official of the State Technology Services which conducted the experiment in collaboration with the state commission said that the idea was to check impersonation and proxy voting through a system. He further added that the system needs some fine-tuning but the technology per se did not find any glitches and can be put to use in future.

The experiment was conducted at 10 polling booths in Komapallu municipality of the Medchal-Malkajgiri district of Telangana. Out of the 7,200 eligible voters, roughly 4200 voters were photographed in the process. All the photographs taken as part of the experiment will be deleted from the system, the official said.

The permission was granted by the state election commission to conduct the experiment after the state government used the same technology on the pensioners receiving government benefits with an astounding accuracy rate of 94 per cent. The central government and states like Haryana have also evinced their interest to use the technology in other departments

Source: Financial Express