IEBC’s performance on voting day was wanting
What you need to know:
- In some places, voting was delayed by more than five hours and some would-be voters might have given up altogether.
- Besides, gubernatorial elections in Kakamega and Mombasa were suspended over errors on the ballot papers.
- The IEBC’s mandate is to conduct free and fair elections. This calls for utmost efficiency.
The technical hitches witnessed during yesterday’s General Election are an indictment of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s (IEBC)performance.
Electronic voter identification kits malfunctioned, causing long delays. Ironically, the electoral agency resorted to manual registers in some areas, just a day after the Court of Appeal suspended their mandatory use.
Following the failure of the Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (Kiems) to identify voters using fingerprint sensors, the manual registers came in handy in nearly 230 polling stations in two counties.
IEBC however said only 200 of the 46,229 kits deployed countrywide failed.
Even if the malfunctions were not widespread enough to substantially undermine the credibility of the elections, they smack of incompetence by IEBC.
One of the four presidential candidates, Prof George Wajackoyah, could not vote until a manual register was provided.
One wonders how many ordinary voters might have been affected by the shortcomings.
An independent MCA candidate in Meru said his name was missing from the ballot paper.
Some voters’ names were missing at polling stations where they cast their ballots in 2017.
The mix-ups in the distribution of ballot papers should have alerted the electoral agency about a looming crisis.
Voting delays
In some places, voting was delayed by more than five hours and some would-be voters might have given up altogether.
By noon, the national turnout stood at 6.6 million or 20 per cent of the 22 million registered voters.
That should have been rectified as there had been complaints about some voters’ names having been clandestinely transferred to faraway polling stations.
Besides, gubernatorial elections in Kakamega and Mombasa were suspended over errors on the ballot papers.
IEBC has been left with an egg on its face. Its officials’ visit to the printer in Greece to confirm the election materials and simulations in the run-up to the poll should have raised issues that needed to be adequately addressed.
The IEBC’s mandate is to conduct free and fair elections. This calls for utmost efficiency.
