2026 elections: Leave no gap in turn to biometrics
Electoral Comission’s Wakiso District Returning Officer, Hajjat Sarah Bukirwa, displays the Biometric Voters Verification machine during the training. Photo by Joseph Kiggundu
What you need to know:
The issue: Biometric voter verification machines
Our view: We urge state actors to do everything within their power to ensure that the country is not confronted with a catastrophic outcome
President Museveni continues to double down on the deployment of biometric voter verification machines at all polling stations during next year’s general elections. Mr Museveni rightly reckons that voter verification machines can solve a perpetual problem. Since time immemorial every election in postcolonial Uganda has been marred by growing instances of fraud.
The scale of the problem was particularly underlined by a string of contestations over the final result in various presidential polls after the turn of the second millennium. Now, in the run-up to another presidential election, early next year, Mr Museveni—who has been on the ballot each time since 1996—is convinced that technology may offer the first real solution[s] to Uganda’s perpetual vote fraud problems.
The biometric voter verification machines Uganda's president since 1986 is putting his faith in taking the fingerprints and photograph of every voter while recording the time they cast their ballot. This facilitates a seamless identification of registered voters.
It is also widely thought that individual voter details—linked to a national identity card—coupled with timestamps have the potential to make ballot stuffing extremely difficult. We believe the turn to biometrics can, if followed to the letter, help improve confidence in Uganda’s fledgling democracy. But a failure to acknowledge the speed bumps ahead, is not without consequences. For starters, the numbers are simply not stacking up.
And we are not just talking about the deficit of 10,000 tablets the Electoral Commission (EC) is struggling to breach. A dry run with 36,000 tablets during last year’s national census did not proceed without any flaws. It appears the EC wants to wish away the technical glitches that plagued the country’s latest decennial census, forcing the count to be extended for several days. Concerns over the absence of a precise picture of the number of polling stations that have reliable Internet coverage appear to have been handled. Albeit gingerly.
Dr Chris Baryomunsi, the Information Communication Technology (ICT) and National Guidance minister, tersely told this newspaper that the biometric machines in the State's possession can work offline. How reassuring. It goes without saying that Minister Baryomunsi's ‘reassurances' could do with some degree of clarity.
Ugandans would doubtless be eager, if desperate, to know how the biometric machines, evidently designed to transmit real-time data through a Sim card, will be able to pull this off without mobile coverage. Glossing over their concerns on the same simply will not cut it. To be clear, this does not in any way mean that we do not believe technology can help the EC keep tabs on overall vote tallies while providing early confirmation of results.
Biometrics also, as we have already articulated, decisively deal with the familiar problem of impersonation during a vote. But the hurried deployment of the technology when a number of bottlenecks have not been surmounted can only be a recipe for disaster. Accordingly, we urge state actors to do everything within their power to ensure that the country is not confronted with a catastrophic outcome.
