Papua New Guinea Electoral Commission is turning to smartphone technology and facial biometrics to clean up its national voter roll ahead of the 2027 General Elections.

Speaking at a Port Moresby Chamber of Commerce and Industry business breakfast at the Royal Papua Yacht Club, Electoral Commissioner Dr. Nicole Haley announced that citizens will soon be able to register and update their voter details directly through their mobile phones.

Beginning in February, the Electoral Commission will launch a nationwide Self-Registration Mode using the government’s Service Pass mobile application.

The app will let voters claim existing electoral records, update their details, request electorate transfers, and capture facial biometrics with liveness checks directly on their personal devices.

By leveraging existing smartphone technology, the Commission aims to avoid the multi-million kina capital costs of purchasing specialised biometric hardware that quickly becomes obsolete.

To safeguard system integrity, self-registrations will require a witness verification step completed by a registered agent or any citizen over the age of 18, followed by formal approval from a local returning officer.

Approved voters will receive a verified digital voter credential stored in their digital Service Wallet.

The initiative follows the successful recovery and migration of the core electoral database, the Provincial Application, to the Department of Information and Communications Technology cloud infrastructure, after being offline for most of the year due to unpaid hosting fees.

Department Secretary Steven Matainaho confirmed that the platform uses a decentralised Public Key Infrastructure architecture, keeping personal identity data encrypted on the user’s mobile device rather than in a vulnerable central database.

While digital credentials will help identify voters and speed up polling-line management on election day, voters will not need a smartphone to cast a ballot.