West Coast Election Office Expands Scope of BIO-key Deployment

BIO-key will be providing expanded biometric authentication services for the Election Office in an unspecified state on the West Coast. The Election Office first contracted BIO-key in June in an effort to meet the state’s security requirements for people with access to voter data.

That Election Office will now be expanding the scope of its arrangement based on that initial success. The new order will ensure that every county in the state is outfitted with the same biometric authentication technology.

BIO-key supplied the Election Office with a Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) solution that combines the company’s biometric software engine with its WEB-key and its PIV-Pro fingerprint scanner. State and local election workers access the state’s centralized voter registration database through a Citrix environment, and those online digital channels will now be secured with strong biometric identity verification.

“BIO-key’s unique biometric multi-factor authentication solution has proven its value to state election offices,” said BIO-key Chairman and CEO Mike DePasquale. “By utilizing biometric authentication, they can tie access to the individual, not a credential, thereby validating the user’s identity and not just their device during login. Given the current threat landscape and challenges facing our election system, we are uniquely positioned to take a leadership role in assisting other states and counties to strengthen their election security.”

BIO-key has previously provided similar authentication technologies for several county election boards in Florida, and indicated that other states are currently in the process of evaluating its technologies. The first two Florida deployments occurred back in 2018, and BIO-key has since followed up with subsequent deployments in Orange County and in two other counties that have not yet been named publicly.

More recently, the company has placed a strong focus on its new PortalGuard portfolio. BIO-key upgraded PortalGuard with new passwordless authentication features earlier this month.

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February 16, 2021 – by Eric Weiss