Bangladesh

Preparation of Electoral Roll with Photographs (PERP)

The ‘Preparation of Electoral Roll with Photographs’ (PERP) project was initiated to create a credible voters list in Bangladesh that would greatly reduce the risk of fraudulent voting practices.

The scheduled national election of 22 January 2007 was cancelled in the face of an intensely discredited voter list that had been estimated to carry 12.2 million duplicate and ‘ghost’ voters. This figure is roughly 13 percent of the total number of eligible voters in Bangladesh and greatly exceeds the traditionally acceptable 5 percent margin of error. In addition to errors on the list itself, the absence of a photograph lead to numerous incidents of vote theft, a common cause of voter disenfranchisement in past elections. Political parties demanded the creation of an accurate voters list with photographs to facilitate free and fair elections.

On 11 January 2007, a new Caretaker Government was sworn in with a mandate to hold credible elections. The BEC was reconstituted shortly after, and unveiled a “Roadmap to Elections” including the completion of required electoral reforms and the creation of a fresh voters list with photographs to prepare for elections in 2008.

UNDP was asked to administer funding from nine international development partners to complete the photo voter list, the primary output of the PERP project. Over 80 million voters were registered under the project in a period of less than one year. This enormous achievement required training more than 500,000 election workers including 104,000 computer operators, procuring over 10,000 laptops with webcams and fingerprint scanners and coordinating activities in nearly 90,000 registration centers across the country. The Bangladesh Election Commission implemented the project with logistical, organizational and professional assistance from the Bangladesh Army. UNDP provided technical assistance, project assurance and fund administration services.

The exercise of creating a new voter list with photographs involved digitally capturing personal data, photographs and fingerprints into laptops, which were integrated with the national database. This requires technology and skills quite different from what has been in practice so far in Bangladesh. A useful and innovative by product of this initiative is the national ID card, which is being given to voters after they register.

The PERP project was formulated as a pooled funded project administered by UNDP and implemented by the Bangladesh Election Commission with funding from the Government of Bangladesh and financial support from nine international development partners (Denmark, the European Commission, Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and UNDP)

Technical requirements and infrastructure fully established and capacity built to enable the GoB to prepare a credible voter list for elections in 2008 and to maintain and update the nationwide list thereafter.