A BPKI Certificate (also known as a client X.509 certificate) is a Digital certificate provided to identify the holder of such certificate while performing online transaction. In case of AFRINIC, the client certificate delivered will hold your NIC-HANDLE as Common Name (CN). AFRINIC BPKI certificate will be used to digitally certify Organisation members right to perform and access certain services online such as RPKI and Board Election.

The Digital Certificate issued by AFRINIC allows us to confirm that you are indeed the representative of a member organisation exercising your right to vote.

The enrolment of your certificate is a process by which your Digital Certificate is integrated into your browser to be automatically used for authentication purpose. The process of this integration is not the same for all browsers. The process pre-defined in the engine we use at AFRINIC is only compatible with Firefox. We are working to extend this to as many browsers as possible. 

Any Administrative contact or any registered contact that has been assigned the ‘Voter’ role can cast a vote. 

You must be an authorised contact of your organisation to obtain a BPKI certificate. If you are an Administrative contact of a Member Organisation you should sent a mail to bpki-help@afrinic.net with proofs of your identity. If you are a technical, billing, abuse or general contact, you will be asked to request a BPKI certificate that has to be approved by the Administrative contact of your Organisation. Click here for more Information.

If you do not see the link to the vote, this means that you have already been issued with a Proxy for the vote. In such case, you cannot exercise your right of vote online anymore. You need to sign the Proxy document and give it to your representative for an onsite vote.

This is because you have not been assigned the ‘Voter’ role. Only administrative contacts of the organisation can appoint the ‘Voter’ role.

Check your certificate and its validity. Clear the cache of your browser and try again. If it does not work still, but your certificate is valid, please contact elections@afrinic.net with all the details and someone from our system team will help you. You might be using an unsupported browser.

Generally you need to allow about 60 minutes between a validation of a certificate request and the reception of the related mail. If after 60 minutes you have not received the details, please:

1. check your spam mailbox
2. check that the e-mail address associated with the NIC-HANDLE is valid.

If all the above are all positive, please contact elections@afrinic.net

Unfortunately only the Administrative contact can approve a BPKI certificate.

Unfortunately you cannot vote until you re-download your proxy form from MyAFRINIC

There is an integrated process to allow anyone who casts a vote to verify the validity of your encrypted vote. 

Each election has a designated set of Trustees. For Board election, the Trustees comprise the Chair of the NomCom, the Chair of the Election committee, and AFRINIC legal counsel. 

You will need a valid ID to collect your Ballot. The ID is checked against the name registered in MyAFRINIC as Organisation contact or Proxy Holder. You will not be able to collect your ballot without a valid ID.

When you cast a vote, you will receive a unique ballot tracker number, which represents and identifies your encrypted vote in the database.