It’s 2024 and today is voting day. You’ve anxiously awaited your time to take part in the elections, in the same democracy that brought freedom to the nation three decades ago. But you have not leapt out of bed to rush to the queues. It’s overcast, and your weather app says the chance of rain is high.

No matter. On your browser app you head to the website of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) – they have a banner up: “Vote now in the 2024 general elections.” You click it. It asks you for a selfie, you upload one and then you see the list of candidates.

Congratulations you have successfully voted. It took you two seconds and now you have an entire public holiday up for free.

Right now, this hypothetical future is unlikely for South Africa, but it was a reality for many Kenyans during their country’s 2022 general elections.

There are hurdles that will be in place before South Africans can take advantage of a biometrics-protected election, some of which will require years of travail, but Cape Town-based digital identity startup iiDENTIFii says it is working on it.

Hypertext recently had the chance to speak with the CEO and founder of iiDENTIFii, Gur Geva, about how his company’s biometrics technology can ensure that South Africa’s free and fair elections are also 100 percent fraud-proof and far more convenient.

iiDENTIFii offers biometric security protection, using a person’s physical characteristics like facial features and fingerprints, to ensure that important private accounts, such as for banks, insurance firms and even mining companies, are safe from threat actors and scammers.

Last year the startup raised $15 million in capital growth funding in preparation for a wider expansion across the African continent, which has seen biometrics used in elections in the past across several nations.

Biometric security during elections

According to Geva, one of the benefits biometrics can provide for general elections, such as those coming up next year, is that the security becomes “voter centric.” Meaning that governments need not spend millions on expensive hardware or software, or “indelible” ink pens, to make sure that no person votes twice.

“There can be a significant reliance on the individual or the voter’s own handset, so you get to the point that a voter enrolls via their own handset, and as a result of that, the amount of hardware that has to be procured by government, and the amount that is potentially available for misallocation is much, much lower,” he told us.

Geva, who first got into biometric security after hearing a personal friend describe how a human trafficker offered her housekeeper R40 000 to take her toddler no questions asked, says that iiDENTIFii’s biometrics can protect against deepfakes, fraudsters and identity thieves.

“We looked at the market, and we saw that the solutions deployed were not adequate, and they weren’t really solving the [identity theft] problem. And for us, that was the reason to start, and the reason to continue,” he said.

He says the iiDENTIFii solution is particularly potent against deepfake attacks and digital replay attacks, especially at scale.

During South Africa’s 2019 general elections, concerns arose that some voters were bypassing the IEC’s protections and were voting twice, either by erasing the ink on their thumbs or by heading to different polling stations.

Thousands of ballot papers were also spoiled, either by accident or on purpose in protect action. An online voting system protected by biometrics would erase these concerns, at least according to Geva.

“The most important thing for biometrics is that it keeps ‘one citizen, one vote’,” he said.

Additionally, “It increases the transparency of the voting process, it removes voter intimidation – a lot of people don’t want to leave their homes to vote because they’re worried about others observing them at the voting polls – but if you can vote from your home, from the comfort of your own device, you will get a much lower level of intimidation.”

Geva also cites studies that indicate that the longer people wait in the queues, the likelier they are to vote for the currently ruling party. “There are unusual behaviours that are driven by having to travel, having to wait in queues, possible manipulation of the ballots – there are a lot of ways to manipulate the one citizen, one vote.”

The future of elections

We asked if he could provide a hypothetical example of how it would actually work for voters to leverage iiDENTIFii’s biometrics during elections.

“In advance of election day, you would register from your mobile device, and you would do a 4D selfie – that will confirm that you are three-dimensional, with the fourth dimension being the time when the selfie was taken,” he says.

In biometrics, this 4D selfie that Geva describes is called a “liveness,” which allows a computer to determine if it is interacting with a physical human being and not a picture, deepfake or video.

“The 4D selfie is matched against an identity document and or a government database. And then we confirm that you are who you say you are, and now you have a valid enrollment to vote. At that point you can prevent duplication.”

“On the voting day itself,” Geva continues, “You verify your face to the original enrollment, you do the same liveness, the 4D selfie, it confirms you are the person that enrolled.”

In total, Geva believes that both enrollment and the second selfie on voting day will take 32 seconds, and it can all be done via smartphone browser app. Further, the webpage needed to perform the liveness can be reverse or zero-rated, cost no data, allowing even the most financially vulnerable to vote – if they have access to a smartphone that is.

Geva says that the digital divide can be overcome through something similar to agent banking, where a IEC official goes to voters and allows them to use company devices to vote. However, smartphone penetration in South Africa remains quite high, with ICASA reporting (PDF) in 2020 that 91.2 percent of South Africans own a smartphone.

This is much higher than the portion of the population that registered to vote in the 2019 general election.

Extreme accuracy

We asked that if during the length of time between enrolment and voting, a person was to cut their hair, shave their beard, or buy contact lenses, would it affect the liveness and your eligibility to vote.

“We work on the ‘biometric triangle’ on the face,” he told us. “What they call ‘face furniture’ so your beard or moustache doesn’t affect that but spectacles can sometimes affect it because the glare from the sun can obscure your eyes. So like passport photos, it’s best to take your glasses off.”

He says the biometric data is also anonymised after the liveness is taken. iiDENTIFii’s technology transforms the data from your selfie, your face, the shape of your eyes, lips, mouth, etc. and transforms it into raw binary values.

He says that “when you actually do the voting, you actually confirm you face to the ones and zeroes. And those ones and zeroes vote. So there’s no one to intimidate and harass, because you can’t find a one and zero on the street, and you can’t subsequently access the database and look for an individual that voted a certain way and is located at this address.”

“One of the things that are important with taking this challenge on, is making sure that the accuracy of the software that is being used is extremely high, and that the false accept rate is incredibly low, and that the friction is low – when it rejects you when it is actually you – is extremely low,” Geva explains.

While iiDENTIFii hasn’t rolled out its biometric products for elections before, it does support banks like Standard Bank with biometric security, and Geva says that the company has the technology necessary to bring its biometrics to South Africa’s voters, or at least in large scale government initiatives and services.

Geva adds that to ensure that voters will be able to use its biometrics at the virtual polls, it has disaster recovery plans in place – which it already runs at its banking customers, covering millions upon millions of accounts.

“We would show what we have done before and ensure that those principles and those processes are adequate in that way. The second thing we do, as we’ve always done, is invite secondary independent audit. We have invited auditors in the past like BDO to audit our system,” he told us.

We asked if iiDENTIFii has reached out to the country’s government to deploy its products during upcoming elections, and while Geva told us that he can’t confirm or deny anything, he says that there is indeed communication happening.

One of the biggest hurdles, Geva says, is educating the voter. South Africa has a long history of aggrandizing standing in long snaking queues, in the pouring rain, to cast your vote because you believe in democracy.

Voting with your phone on your couch is much less romantic. It would take years for the government to educate voters on how an online voting system would work, he says. But he believes it can work.

“As long as it’s simple for the voter, but it takes a lot of hard work to make something complex simple.”

[Image – Photo by George Prentzas on George Prentzas]