Body Odour Might Be Used To Identify Voters In The Future – INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced that it might use the body odour of Nigerians for voters verification in the foreseeable future.

The chairman of the electoral body, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu stated this on Tuesday while speaking at the Chatham House in London.

Naija News reports that in the past, electorates were verified by simply looking at their paper cards.

In 2012, INEC introduced the Smart Card Readers SCR to verify the Permanent Voter Cards PVCs which contained the facials of voters.

The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS which verifies both the facials and the fingerprints was later introduced.

This development also entails INEC using the Automated Biometric Identification System ABIS.

Hailing the commission’s in-house engineers for the design of the BVAS and coming up with innovative ideas and designs to enhance the electoral process, Yakubu stated that an engineer had proposed the use of body odour to verify voters.

Yakubu said; “The clean up of the register was painstakingly conducted by the commission because of the Automated Biometric Identification System ABIS. Before now, the commission used the AFIS, the fingerprint identification system but this time around, we used the ABIS, meaning both fingerprint and facial, and that is what we are also using to accredit voters on election day.

“All these innovations were all the work of INEC’s own in-house engineers in the commission. The machines may have been fabricated outside the country but the design of the machines were done by our own engineers in-house.

“In fact, one of them said they were going to introduce a new biometric using body odour. I said, ‘please, not yet. Let’s make haste slowly’. But when he explained it to me, it sounded logical. He said, don’t laugh, chairman, because I said body odour is also biometric. He said, how does your dog recognize you? It is from your body odour and that is why if another person walks into the house it barks, when you move into the house, it wags its tail because it recognizes your body odour. I said, ‘but for elections let’s wait, not now’.”