70,000 fingerprints can be verified in less than one hour: Nasheed

Presidential candidate of Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), former president Mohamed Nasheed has said that the task of ‘verification of fingerprints’ of registered voters can be completed in less than one hour.

While Department of National Registration (DNR) has said that it does not have the capability to verify fingerprints, Nasheed said that fingerprint verification is simple and should not take too much time.

“To verify means to confirm. What we need to check is a person’s fingerprint, and we have to identify the best way to verify it. It has to be compared with something - the person’s finger. The person’s phone number is stated on the form. So why don’t they call him up and ask if it’s his form? The purpose of verification is to confirm that the form was submitted by the person whose fingerprint is on the form,” he said.

Nasheed said that the person’s phone number, address and other details are stated on the form, thus, it should not be difficult to verify the validity of the form. He said that the fingerprint is, in fact, not that important in this particular instance.

“So I think verification of fingerprints should not even take one hour, even if they’re verifying 70,000 fingerprints,” he said.

DNR, Elections Commission, and the police have all said that it would not be easy to verify fingerprints, and that it would take five minutes to verify one fingerprint.

When asked how the commission should proceed if they suspect fraud regarding the forms, Nasheed said, “If so why don’t they summon him? To verify, if they suspect fraud, they should call him and ask him to come down. The person is working on his own registration. We know that he is eligible to register. What he says about his own registration, what’s that got to do with anyone else?” he said.

Referring to the requirement stated on the Supreme Court guideline that all forms should carry fingerprints, Nasheed said that the judges do not have much knowledge about fingerprints, and chose to add the point about fingerprints to the guideline based on remarks made by some groups.

“They don’t even know how fingerprints are taken. They just wrote it down after someone said something,” he said.

The Supreme Court has ordered to include fingerprints in the re-registration forms. This was stated in the guideline issued by the court after it annulled the result of the first round of the presidential election.

Nasheed said that ‘this is not a situation that calls for an investigation’, and that fingerprints should not be a reason to obstruct the election.

While Nasheed has suggested the commission call people on the numbers stated on the forms if they suspect fraud, officials have recently discovered that the same phone number has been stated on a large number of the forms.