Haiti, a country where the oxygen of democracy has been scarce due to years of political instability and a desire to question the results and the unequal access to public services, nevertheless, trust has not been a characteristic of recent democracies. It does not begin and end with the polling station to strengthen confidence in the vote. It starts with a plausible means of verifying that those intending to vote are who they say they are, that each individual can vote by him/herself, once, and that every valid ballot will be counted. Intelligently implemented digital identity verification can restore that trust, without leaving the formal documentless minority out of the picture.
The trust problem starts with identity
Harboring suspicion of impersonation, duplicate or criminal registrations, and voter fraud occur in high volume when voter lists are old or created from disparate records. Pre-existing distrustful communities are further divided when outcomes are near. Digital identity verification can mitigate this underlying issue by basing the voter roll upon verifiable attributes on a consistent basis. This may include the registration of a user with a secure online digital profile that is developed using document verification, biometric enrollment, and proof-of-life systems. This is not to provide a surveillance system but to provide a fool system with a broad brush system of making such an assertion as that the same person who signed the register is the same person who has presented himself or herself to vote.
Inclusion must be the first design principle
An identity scheme requiring passports or other rigid official identifications will prove to be a failure in situations where the majority of the citizens do not have any paperwork or where records have been distorted by emigration and earthquakes. A layered model of proofs should be acceptable in a Haitian approach. An individual can provide a national ID when supplied with one, yet individuals without official paperwork may be eligible through a combination of community testifying, existing civil records, mobile-based checks, much the same way a cell number can be used and confirmed as belonging to a face, over time. Liveness verification can verify that the registrant is a live human being at the time of registration, and offline-ready kits enable enrolling and verification in low-connectivity regions.
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Building a clean voter roll with continuous verification
Voter lists are mutilated between each election due to people transferring, death, or name change. The ultimate record – a living voter registry- is given support by a digital verification layer that is continuously enhanced, not in half-baked pre-election drives. The process of periodic re-verification windows can be carried out using community centers, temporary field groups, and hand-held devices, whereby the citizens re-verify their information, update additional attributes such as their preferred polling locations, and alleviate duplications raised by the system. Where there is a national civil record, safe data-sharing arrangements can mitigate the need to reconcile records. In those areas where they are weak, the election authority can use its own embedded verifying profiles and audit trails to ensure integrity.
At the polling place: fast, fair, and private
The ID verification process should be easy and fast on the day of the elections. A poll worker needs to be able to authenticate the identity of a voter by scanning a QR code on a voter card or a mobile-based credential and running through a brief biometric match. This should be an offline system and synced once the connection is available again. More importantly, the action of the verification must also only check the eligibility and single-vote status without divulging extra personality information, as well as securing the sanctity of the vote. Provided that connectivity permits, a successful verification can even mark such a profile as voted so that no other future attempts can even take place in other places.
Diaspora participation and secure remote options
The diaspora of Haiti is huge and politically active. The use of digital identity verification, when lawmakers decide to make it happen, can pave the way to safe voting by absentee or out of the country. Document verification, facial biometrics, and liveness checks within a controlled timeframe could be followed by one-time voting credential issuance using a remote verification flow. Absentee ballot means on paper and can still be used still but the front-end identity proofing gives a chain of assurance that the ballot was cast by the verified voter. In the places where e-voting does not seem possible or recommended, ID verification is still capable of eliminating significant holes in the absentee process.
Transparency, audits, and civil oversight
There is no way a technology can substitute for the monitoring of the crowds; it is to facilitate it. There must be transparent standards, performance KPIs, and independent audit outcomes disclosed by any digital verification rollout. This is the number of incorrect matches, the enrollment success rates between different departments, and the time to address risks. There must be a civil organized access to monitor the operations, test the system to be implemented, and protest the system via the stipulated path. The presence of open-source modules or at least the availability of open entrances to the audit facilitates experts to assess the security of a system without revealing sensitive source code.
Safeguarding rights and data
Security should be a stiff requirement; it cannot be an afterthought. The voters in Haiti must be provided with legal assurances that biometric and personal information cannot be used by anyone in policing and immigration matters or political profiling. There must be very little it stores, such that everything in transit and at rest is end-to-end encrypted, identity checking should be independent of vote casting, in order to ensure that no one can correlate a particular identity with a particular ballot. The use of retention schedules that are very strict, data access logging as well as independent data protection oversight supplements these measures. There must be clear redress mechanisms that will enable citizens to understand the data held about them and be able to edit out wrong information and even make complaints.
Practical steps to get started
Haiti can start with pilots in a handful of communes to register new voters and to scrub existing lists, through the use of mobile kits and smart software designed to go offline-first. The more significant aspect than the technology is the training of the poll workers and local civil servants. In contracts involving vendors, these should be in the form of performance guarantees, capacity building, and knowledge transfer in that country, so that in the long term, the system would be maintained locally. Development partners can attach their funding to more transparent milestones and publication reporting. Success will become shorter waiting lines, a reduced number of conflicts at polling places, increased membership in the underserved regions, and legitimate audits that have proven that it is one person, one vote.
Rebuilding trust, one verified vote at a time
The elections gain legitimacy when the people involved in the process consider it to be equal and fair. One solution to the reduced risk of fraud, broaden the number of eligible voters, and engender verifiable confidence in the results is digital identity verification that is specific to Haitian circumstances and civil liberties. It is not a silver bullet; however, with good institutions, independent oversight, and education of the population, it can assist Haiti in transforming suspicion into action and showing that action results in sustainable democratic trust.
Hairs
Mehar Mozan