A Closer Look: Free and Fair, Finally?

In many parts of the developing world, election rigging, vote fraud, and political thuggery are serious impediments to the free and fair functioning of democracy. Such is the case in Bangladesh, a young nation that has seen a century’s share of upheaval since its establishment in 1971. Bangladesh has been in a state of emergency under a caretaker government since January 2007. As per the constitution, the caretaker government assumed power in order to prepare for national elections following the end of Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia’s five-year term in October 2006. Subsequent boycotts, riots, and an extensive anti-corruption campaign led by the caretaker government have left this small, sea-level country in the lurch for months.

Doubts about the likelihood of upcoming elections, suspended indefinitely for a time, have gradually been replaced with hope that political change is drawing near. While some Bangladeshis have waited patiently for elections, viewing the harsh measures of the anti-corruption campaign as part of an unpleasant but necessary clean-up, others have complained that military officials are claiming too much power for themselves, or that the caretaker government is doing little to improve life in Bangladesh. Still others have denounced the caretaker government for committing gross human rights violations with impunity. Increasingly, there is a sense of political urgency in Bangladesh. This attitude recognizes that internationally-approved elections are a must if the country is to receive the foreign support needed to recover from natural disasters, endemic poverty, and a worsening food crisis, to name a few of Bangladesh’s myriad problems.

Amidst this political turmoil, however, there is decisive progress towards elections to be held in December 2008. BIO-key and Tiger IT announced today that the “deployment of a biometric-based credentialing solution for the Bangladesh Voter Registration Project is scheduled to conclude at the end of this month”. This is the most recent phase in an ambitious program, initiated in early 2007, to issue national identity cards to document all of Bangladesh’s voters. Mocked at first by many Bangladeshis, this project has so far registered 75 million voters, roughly half the national population. BIO-key’s fingerprint recognition software, combined with hundreds of ID management servers maintained by Tiger IT, has helped to orchestrate the largest biometric deployment ever recorded. Voter lists, previously co-opted, forged, and filled with fake names by competing political parties, are “going to be a list of quality no less than that of America (USA) or England (UK)," according to Dr. Mohammed Yusuf, a consultant employed by Britain’s Department for International Development in a survey of the registration process.

There are any number of ways for the upcoming elections to go wrong—or not to happen at all. But increased international and civil society oversight of elections, enhanced by technological innovation, might help to bring a measure of fairness and accountability to the political process. If current plans proceed in 2008, December’s election day will mark the first time that Bangladeshis have been able to vote for a political change since 2001. And if the December elections are free and fair—if Bangladesh can move beyond “the Battle of the Begums” and the open fraud that has characterized recent elections—then the contributions of BIO-key and Tiger IT will stand as a significant achievement in combating corruption. Bangladesh will certainly test the ability of innovation to improve government accountability. Regardless of the outcome in December, it is likely this often-overlooked country will provide strategic lessons that can be applied to elections in struggling democracies around the world.