Having a reliable voter list for conducting free and fair elections in Bangladesh was earlier considered unachievable due to political instability, widespread corruption, and weak and demoralized leadership. However, in 2008 the PERP project succeeded in building the world’s currently largest biometric database covering the entire Bangladeshi voting age population, 80 million people. This paper describes the PERP project as well as the history of failed projects and analyses success factors based on the IS implementation literature. This is an interpretive case study where both primary and secondary data have been used. The key finding is that the major reason behind the success was to get the project done in a ‘politically controlled’ environment where the people worked in a highly structured management system following a concrete and realistic roadmap. The implications of this finding are discussed.