{"id":27527,"date":"2023-05-25T14:30:26","date_gmt":"2023-05-25T13:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/?p=27527"},"modified":"2023-05-25T14:52:06","modified_gmt":"2023-05-25T13:52:06","slug":"voter-id-most-people-are-terrible-at-matching-faces-to-photos-making-polling-checks-unreliable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2023\/05\/25\/voter-id-most-people-are-terrible-at-matching-faces-to-photos-making-polling-checks-unreliable\/","title":{"rendered":"Voter ID: most people are terrible at matching faces to photos, making polling checks unreliable"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday May 4, for the first time, members of the public voting in local council elections in England were required to bring photo ID to their polling station.\u00a0Initial reports<\/a>\u00a0suggested that a few people were turned away because they didn\u2019t bring one of the approved forms of photo ID.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

But even if they did bring the right documents, such as a driving licence or passport, there\u2019s a question mark over whether the people manning polling stations could tell accurately whether the voter was the person pictured in the ID.<\/p>\n

When you present your photo ID to be checked, the person looking at it has to decide if your face matches the picture in the document. In a lab, this is usually\u00a0done with images and is called \u201cface matching\u201d<\/a>. Such studies typically present two face images side-by-side and ask people to judge whether the images show the same person or two different people.<\/p>\n

While people perform well at this task when they are\u00a0familiar with the person pictured<\/a>, studies report the error rate can be\u00a0as high as 35%<\/a>\u00a0when those pictured are unfamiliar. Even when people are asked to compare a live person standing in front of them with a photo, a recent study found they still got\u00a0more than 20% of their answers wrong<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Natural ability<\/h2>\n

The people checking our photo ID are almost always unfamiliar with us, so we should expect that this is a difficult, error-prone task for them. And while you might think that people whose job it is to check photo ID would be better at it than the rest of us,\u00a0cashiers<\/a>,\u00a0police officers<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0border control officers<\/a>\u00a0have all been shown to be as poor at face matching as untrained people.<\/p>\n

The study of border control officers also showed they don\u2019t improve at the task as time goes on \u2013 there was no relationship between their performance and the number of years they had spent in the job.<\/p>\n

This suggests that face recognition ability doesn\u2019t change with practice. While repeated exposure to variable images of one person\u2019s face can help you to recognise them,\u00a0professional facial image comparison courses<\/a>\u00a0aimed at training face identification ability have not been shown to produce lasting improvements in performance.<\/p>\n

There is, however, an argument for the role of natural ability in face recognition. People known as\u00a0\u201csuper-recognisers\u201d<\/a>\u00a0perform far better than the general population at tests of face recognition, and have been used by police forces to identify criminals.<\/p>\n

For example, super-recognisers could be asked to look through images of wanted persons and then try to find them in CCTV footage, or match images caught on CCTV to police mugshots. Some of us are just better than others at these types of task.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/h2>\n

Error-prone task<\/h2>\n

But why is it so difficult for most of us to recognise an unfamiliar person across different images? We all know that we look different in different pictures \u2013 not many of us would choose to use our passport image on a dating website. And this\u00a0variability in appearance<\/a>\u00a0is what makes unfamiliar face matching so difficult.<\/p>\n

When we are familiar with someone, we have seen their face many times looking lots of different ways. We have been exposed to a high amount of this \u201cwithin-person variability\u201d, enabling us to put together a stable representation of that familiar person in our minds.<\/p>\n

In fact, exposure to within-person variability has been shown to be crucial for\u00a0learning<\/a>\u00a0what a new face looks like. With unfamiliar people, we just haven\u2019t seen enough of their variability to reliably decide whether they look like the image in their photo ID.<\/p>\n

Photo ID at elections<\/h2>\n

Here\u2019s what this means for photo ID at elections, which was introduced as an attempt to tackle voter fraud. In fact, aside from the issue of people not having the required form of photo ID in order to vote, having people at polling stations check photo ID may not actually be a reliable way of verifying voters\u2019 identities.<\/p>\n

People could be falsely matched to an incorrect ID, or incorrectly turned away on the basis that they don\u2019t match the photo in the document. Unfamiliar face matching is error-prone, and can\u2019t be reliably trained.<\/p>\n

So, unless the people at the polling stations are super-recognisers, they may find it difficult and make errors when matching voters to their photo IDs.<\/p>\n

Katie Gray<\/a> is <\/span>Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading.<\/p>\n

Kay Ritchie<\/a> is <\/span>Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Lincoln.<\/p>\n

This article was republished from\u00a0The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons licence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thursday May 4, for the first time, members of the public voting in local council elections in England were required to bring photo ID to their polling station.\u00a0Initial reports\u00a0suggested…Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":693,"featured_media":27528,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1785],"tags":[2396,2277,2395,2394],"class_list":["post-27527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agriculture-food-and-health","tag-facial-recognition","tag-feature","tag-uk-council-elections","tag-voter-id"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVoter ID: most people are terrible at matching faces to photos, making polling checks unreliable - Connecting Research<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here\u2019s what this means for photo ID at elections, which was introduced as an attempt to tackle voter fraud. 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