The National Election Committee (NEC) will begin testing a new electronic voter registration system early next month that introduces safeguards to prevent voter fraud. As it prepares to roll out the new system in time for the 2017 commune elections, the NEC will recruit a small army of 7,500 technicians to go into the provinces and register the roughly 10 million people of voting age in the country.
Working with a battery-powered laptop and fingerprint scanner, the technicians will use voters’ thumbprints, ID cards, and names to register them in the NEC’s database.
Testing of the new registration technology is slated to start November 1 in several remote communes, before voter registration proper begins in March of next year. NEC officials say the registration process will take three months, lasting until August 10, in the run-up to the 2017 election season.
Kuoy Bun Roeun of the NEC said the committee will use a widespread marketing campaign, including advertisements and TV spots, to ensure that no citizens miss the chance to register to vote.
“We will use all the media in Cambodia to encourage people to register,” he said.
Growing Pains
NEC officials say the switch from traditional registration to electronic voter registration will be difficult, especially in rural areas where electricity is spotty and Internet access often nonexistent.
Mr. Bun Roeun said that finding technicians who understand computers in rural districts will be difficult. Without reliable electricity, the teams will have only 12 hours to register voters before recharging their equipment. Since there is often no Internet access outside the cities, they will be required to carry the registered voter data back to the city on a flash drive, and then use the Internet to upload it to the NEC servers.
The new registration system also uses ID cards to identify voters, but many voters in rural provinces do not have identification paperwork, according to Org Savang, senior program officer at the Committee for Free and Fair Elections Cambodia (COMFREL). To ensure that everyone can register, even if they are missing paperwork, a team from the Ministry of the Interior will accompany the NEC workers to give IDs to voting-age citizens as needed.
Stamping Out Voter Fraud
Despite the technical problems that come with switching from traditional voter registration to a modern system, NEC staff say the changes are necessary to avoid a repeat of the voter fraud that plagued the most recent elections. In 2013 many voters who had registered found that their names were not on the voter rolls and were unable to vote, while others voted twice using assumed names.
“[Voter fraud] was a big problem, among other problems,” said Mr. Savang. “During previous elections, some voters had no name on the voter list, but they could cast their vote by using another voter’s name.”
Problems with registering voters could also be blamed partly on poor handwriting, said Hue Rong, the chief of the operations department at the National Election Committee. “Previously, the registration system was manually conducted, and then we sent those documents to the computer center,” he said. “The handwriting was hard to read. It caused confusion.”
Without safeguards to prevent people from voting twice under an assumed name, some would-be voters found their vote had been stolen by the time they got to the polling station. By linking names to fingerprints, the new electronic voter registration system will prevent this sort of vote theft. It will also prevent the “ghost voter” problem, where registered voters are found to be nonexistent.
Hacker-proof
Once the voter data is safely on their servers in Phnom Penh, the NEC staff will ensure that it is not tampered with or altered.
Prime Minister Hun Sen in March asked that the Japanese government in March to send voter registration experts to the country to help ensure the database is secure. “[The Japanese] sent a database expert to prevent against database breach,” said Mr. Bun Roeung. “It is a very sophisticated system.”
It may use sophisticated databases and fingerprint recognition software, but the goal of the electronic registration is simple: to ensure that every Cambodian gets one, and only one, vote. “When we use computers in each village,” said Mr. Rong. “It will be more accurate.”