UN Funds Ridiculous Biometric Voting ID … in Yemen

Photo Credit: Suprema, Inc.Biometric fingerprint scanners are scheduled to be used in the 2014 presidential election in Yemen.

The South Korean company Suprema, Inc. announced this week that it had won a contract from the Yemeni government to provide about 4,800 of its RealScan-D live scanners for the election, which is expected to take place in February of next year. Money provided through the United Nations Development Program is paying for the scanners.

“Yemen has come one step closer to adopting democracy and is now preparing for the new presidential elections by strategically investing the funds from the UNDP,” said Suprema in a press release. The company’s president, James Lee, said: “The Arab Spring was the advent of free election and the pro-democracy movement in the Middle East. I believe there will be many more voter registration projects to follow.”

The RealScan-D devices work by capturing a person’s fingerprint or palm-print (or both) and storing that image and biometric data. Similar scanners can also capture signatures and photos and identification cards of the persons registering to vote and store that information in their data file.

Read more from this story HERE.