– First draft presented (in absentia) at the 2015 meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO), February 3-7, 2015 (Santa Fe, NM, USA)
– Workshoped at the IT University of Copenhagen by invitation of the DemTech Research Group, March 9, 2015 (Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Final draft to be presented at the 2016 meeting the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO) for the symposium panel on ‘The Pacific in the Digital Age’ (San Diego, CA, USA)

Abstract:

For the 2014 national (and provincial) election(s), the first after the withdrawal of the military arm of the Australia-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), a digital biometric voter registration system was introduced. Internationally and among local elites the system has been widely lauded as a panacea for the rampant corruption that has plagued the country’s electoral system since independence. The goal of this paper is to put this hope into perspective by unveiling and bringing into dialogue three and a half stories on biometric voting in Solomon Islands: (1) the international, (2) the state (and urban), and (3) the village one – and as half-story the technological particularities of biometric voter registration itself. We argue that the system ultimately was an expensive prop to a performance of democracy that satisfied the international donor community but on the ground created new forms of corruption and nurtured old ones in ways that further undermine traditional sources of checks and balances in an already volatile political environment.

Authors: Stephanie Hobbis & Geoffrey Hobbis