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. Initial reports suggested that a few people were turned away because they didn’t bring one of the approved forms of photo ID.
But even if they did bring the right documents, such as a driving licence or passport, there’s a question mark over whether the people manning polling stations could tell accurately whether the voter was the person pictured in the ID.
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 done with images and is called “face matching”. 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.
