Video Verification: An Alternative form of Identify Verification

Abstract

Voting in the United States is a constitutional right, allowing citizens to voice concerns involving policies and laws. It is an essential civil liberty, in which the modification of voter laws can affect over 206 million eligible voters. Since 2008, more than half of the States in the U.S.A. have or are in the process of implementing voter ID laws. These laws have introduced many problems associated with identification credentials, including non-photo voter IDs and photo IDs that are required to vote. If all these new laws are passed, it is predicted that millions of Americans will be disenfranchised, making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast ballots. This paper introduces an identity verification method called video verification (vSquared). vSquared is a tool that uses a video of a person stating their name and address to verify identify claims. In this experiment, the identity verification methods included the use of a person presenting a voter ID card (without photo), a photo ID card, and using vSquared. Each of these three methods had a real condition where the person and matching ID were all legitimate and also a fraudulent condition where impersonation was involved. Each participant had to verify the identity of three different individuals, where some of the individuals represented real conditions while others were impersonating someone else. Participants in the study played the role analogous to a poll worker and had to say if they thought the condition was real or fraudulent. This is similar to the scenario where a poll worker would have to verify an individual's identity prior to voting in an election. The experiment aimed to identify the major differences in recognition rates, if any, for the current verification methods (voter ID and photo ID) against each other and also vSquared. Based on this research, vSquared detected fraud at least 70% more accurately than a non-photo voter ID or photo ID. Although, both the photo ID and vSquared identifying methods were proficient when identifying conditions that were considered to be legitimate IDs, 72% of participants preferred vSquared as a more accurate method for identity verification.