Design and Implementation of a Secure System for Managing Parliamentary Elections via Biometric Voting: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

This paper is an interdisciplinary, new review on biometric electronic voting (BEV) systems and low-middle-income countries, providing a comparative assessment of 8 national implementations of election systems based on the synthesis of 28 scholarly, institutional, and technical publications published during 2010-2024. Unlike previous reports, including International IDEA (2017) that did not consider much beyond the logistics of voter registration, or the European Parliamentary Research Service (2018), which did not consider much beyond data privacy in high-income settings, this review combines evidence in three key areas: (1) technical design (e.g., offline capability, biometric modality, security architecture), (2) legal and institutional frameworks (e.g., data protection laws, electoral oversight), and (3) socio-political considerations (e.g., In our analysis, we find that four success factors are common, which include off line functionality, ownership of the domestic system, sound poll worker training, and alignment with the legal safeguards. In contrast, 5 systemic barriers were always posing as a problem to BEV deployments: gaps in infrastructure (observed in 6 of 8 countries), lack of strong data protection laws (7 cases), lack of public education, technical breakdown during polling (e.g. in Ghana and Nigeria), and burdening vulnerable populations with biometric inaccuracy. By forming a practical, context-sensitive model of creating secure, trustworthy and equitable BEV systems within resource-limited democratic contexts, the paper fills a critical void in the body of existing literature