Should IEBC deploy electronic voting?

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we work, learn and play. So the question of whether it can change the way we vote in elections has an obvious affirmative answer – Yes.

The US, one of the most advanced nations, is also grappling with the best way to hold their 2020 general elections in the face of the pandemic.  They seem to be haggling over using their postal service, otherwise known as ‘snail mail’ as opposed to using e-voting.

Whereas e-voting is quite a common practice in Europe and Asia, it seems to have a lower priority in the US, particularly in recent times where foreign adversaries are considered to be tampering with their elections in one form or another.

The option to e-vote therefore remains in various states of the US as it continues to be perfected in Estonia and adopted in other emerging democracies, including Brazil and Argentina.

But what exactly does e-voting entail?

Contrary to popular thinking, our 2013 and 2017 elections did not have any e-voting, despite the many digital gadgets one may have encountered during the voting process.

There were two digital devices used in the last general elections - the biometric voter registration (BVR) and the electronic voter identification (e-VID) devices.

The BVR device is what gets your name entered into the electronic voter registry, after the IEBC confirms your eligibility to vote and the e-VID is what they use on election day to verify that you are indeed the valid voter who registered with them earlier on.

Once validated, you are given the manual ballot papers and you select your candidate and cast your vote manually. The IEBC officials also count the physical vote cast manually when polls close.

These two processes of physically selecting your candidate and physically counting the votes are the ones that when moved into the electronic platform, become e-voting.

In other words, Kenya has never done e-voting and the Covid-19 situation is making it an increasingly worthwhile consideration.

With e-voting, the voters would be able to basically choose between going to the polling station and voting electronically on the e-voting machines there or sit at home and vote through the Internet using their mobile phone, laptop or whatever devices they have to connect to the Internet.

Of course our general elections are two years away and we do hope the Covid-19 situation will have improved significantly so as to make the current manual way voting not a major health risk.

However, we need to hope for the best while planning for the worst.

Exploring options

The IEBC should be deliberately exploring e-voting options for Kenyans and perhaps plan to deploy the same in any by-elections or referendum that may or may not occur before 2022.

The digital electoral technology has matured so much and with the advent of Blockchain-based systems, most of the security concerns around e-voting are pretty much taken care of.

The issue of Wanjiku not being ICT-savvy to vote electronically should be rejected with the contempt it deserves since Wanjiku has successfully been using M-Pesa and other mobile money platforms over the last decade without challenges.

The user interface for an e-voting application is not likely to be any different. If Wanjiku can select recipients from her address book and send some amount of money to them after typing in her PIN, she can surely be able to select a candidate and vote for him or her.

The bigger problem with electronic electoral systems has never been the voter, it has always been the legislators.

In their last amendment to the election laws following the nullification of the presidential election, the MPs hurriedly revoked anything electronic and declared that the IEBC can hold the general elections in full manual mode.

That is what should be revisited in order to facilitate any deliberations towards e-voting.