The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, has said that the commission may consider the use of body odour for verification of voters in future elections.
He made this revelation on Tuesday at Chatham House, London.
He commended the in-house engineers of the commission for putting in place the BVAS and for always innovating good designs and ideas to render the electoral process much productive.
The chairman said an engineer at the commission had suggested the use of body odour for voter’s verification.
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’.”