Electronic identification failed in 12% of polling stations

2024-03-14 09:15:00, Politikë CNA

The electronic voter identification process, which was built and used in the 2021 parliamentary and local government elections in 2023, aimed to rid Albanian elections of several recurring concerns, including family voting, voting in place of another citizen and double voting. But an analysis by the Central Election Commission found that in the May 14, 2023 local government elections, the equipment malfunctioned in 581 of the nearly 5,200 polling stations in which it was used, an analysis by the Central Election Commission said.

The Electronic Identification Device (EID) was purchased by the CEC through a procurement process. Its aim is to read biometric cards or passports and read the voter's fingerprint, so that there is no uncertainty in this process and to avoid voting for others.

The reasons for electronic identification malfunction are divided into three major categories, according to the study; lack of operators, lack of connection to the GSM mobile communication network and defective equipment.

In the 12 percent of cases where the equipment did not work, the reason was simple: the Central Election Commission could not find employees to operate it. Most of these cases belonged to the counties of Vlorë and Gjirokastër, two counties that were significantly depopulated during the last decades.

"The voting centers of the first category, which did not have an operator in the voting centers to use the PEI device, belong to the vast majority of them to the counties of Vlorë and Gjirokastër, specifically to the municipalities of Dropulli, Finiq and Konispol. For these municipalities, the process of recruiting operators has failed. The difficulty of recruiting operators due to the emigration of the population is a repeated situation in the parliamentary elections of 2021," the audit report reads.

In the second category, where it was more than half of the cases, the problem was not in the malfunction of the device but in the lack of GSM waves. According to the CEC, in these cases the devices worked and performed the function of voter identification but did not transmit the data to the CEC.

In about 200 cases, the device did not work even though the operator was on duty and the transmission appeared to be working. In these cases, the problems were related to various categories of physical defects, including the USB port not reading or incorrectly installed software. The device uses the USB port to read a data store containing the list of voters of the respective polling station.

The audit report notes, however, that the equipment activity log system did not record detailed data to understand what went wrong on a case-by-case basis but only general data that did or did not work.

"From the findings of external experts, it was noticed that PEI devices document (log) files only in the basic part of operation and configuration. In this way it is impossible to diagnose and document the exact steps that have been taken on a particular device as the level of LOG detail is very simple and basic,” the report reads.

Consequently, an error code can refer to dozens of different problems, which cannot be correctly identified./BIRN