Facial-Recognition Fallback — Iraq's IHEC Adds Face Biometrics to Voter Verification for the 2025 Election

After the Kurdistan Region election in October 2024 recorded roughly 400,000 fingerprint-verification failures, Iraq's Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) decided to add facial recognition as a secondary verification channel for the November 11, 2025 parliamentary election, which involved nearly 30 million eligible voters choosing a 329-seat parliament.
South Korean vendor Miru was contracted in May 2025 following Council of Ministers approval; at each polling station, up to 5% of registered voters may verify using face biometrics alone if their fingerprint fails. The rollout was paired with a nationwide biometric registration drive that added 2.15 million new voters, bringing the total enrolled to 21.4 million — the highest figure since 2005.
Citing confidence in the combined fingerprint, face-biometric and real-time-photograph verification stack, IHEC chose to drop indelible ink for the 2025 vote — a decades-old anti-fraud safeguard — before any independent, published evaluation of the new facial-recognition system's accuracy or error rates under Iraqi conditions was available, leaving the guarantee against repeat voting resting on a largely unaudited new system.

Read the full analysis: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/9/special-voting-for-forces-the-displaced-in-iraq-parliamentary-polls-begins