Uganda's lawmakers admitted they have zero clue how the biometric voting machines work just weeks before the election, and opposition leader Joel Ssenyonyi called out the whole mess after the Electoral Commission asked for nearly half a trillion shillings to build thousands of new polling stations at the last minute. Speaker Anita Among got visibly annoyed and asked if officials had been sleeping through five years of prep time. The machines are supposed to stop multiple voting and fake identities, but trainers cannot explain error codes, and backup plans are basically nonexistent.
Muhammad Nsereko raised alarms about data security after hearing the supplier might be Chinese, which would give a foreign company access to millions of fingerprints and facial scans. Electoral Commission spokesperson Julius Mucunguzi said they grabbed over 109,000 devices with two per station as backup and started training 51,000 operators this week. Voters without national IDs can use location slips with barcodes, but millions still have not collected their documents. The whole system runs offline during voting, but past elections in other African countries showed biometric failures causing delays and disputes that lasted months.
Muhammad Nsereko raised alarms about data security after hearing the supplier might be Chinese, which would give a foreign company access to millions of fingerprints and facial scans. Electoral Commission spokesperson Julius Mucunguzi said they grabbed over 109,000 devices with two per station as backup and started training 51,000 operators this week. Voters without national IDs can use location slips with barcodes, but millions still have not collected their documents. The whole system runs offline during voting, but past elections in other African countries showed biometric failures causing delays and disputes that lasted months.
