IEBC seeks to quell fears on use of digital register
Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission chairman Wafula Chebukati (centre) addresses journalists at the Bomas of Kenya about the transmission of election results and the commission’s preparedness while flanked by other commissioners.
The electoral agency was yesterday June 20 pressed to give assurances that its move to abandon the use of a physical register and instead solely identify voters electronically will not disenfranchise some of them.
This emerged as the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) sealed the final voters’ roll at 22.12 million registered voters, who will be eligible to take part in the August 9 General Election.
IEBC chairperson Wafula Chebukati explained that the move to ditch the physical register for a digital one was geared to guard against malpractices witnessed in the 2017 polls. These include multiple voting, infiltration of Kiems (elections technology) kits, abnormal turnouts in areas considered strongholds and collusion by electoral officers to aid in voting for those who were not able to make it to polling stations.
The assurance came after stakeholders, led by Azimio presidential candidate Raila Odinga’s agent Paul Mwangi, raised concerns over integrity of the voters’ register, lack of a backup or complementary system in case of technology failure and safeguards put in place in case of challenges.
Mr Chebukati said use of the digital register would prevent malpractices as well as any sabotage that was witnessed before. IEBC chief executive Marjan Hussein Marjan said the use of the digital register will only allow legitimate voting while easily identifying any illegitimate voting.
He said the use of the physical register allowed some rogue IEBC officers to manipulate the register either by deleting names of voters or loading names of those who have not voted, to vote for others. On technology failure, Mr Marjan assured that the Kiems kits will have four backup kits in each of the 1,450 wards.
He said the electoral agency has 58,100 kits ready for use in the 46,232 polling stations that will be used in the August elections.
Further, they will use sim cards connected to mobile network through GSM and are easy to replace in case of any failure and the lost time compensated for.
Mr Chebukati said the final register will be gazetted either today or tomorrow (Wednesday) and will include voters’ count per county, constituency and ward.
“The final register has 22,120,458 voters and that is the number of registered voters who will participate in 2022 polls,” said Mr Chebukati. He said women represent 49.12 per cent of voters registered and men represent 50.88 per cent of the total voters, demonstrating that women are still underrepresented in the register of voters. The number of youth aged between 18 and 34 years old constituted 39.84 per cent but represented a decline of 5.27 per cent compared to 2017.
Further, he said, the analysis of youth enrolment statistics showed that the number of registered female youth voters has declined by 7.75 per cent in the period 2017 to 2022, while male youth enrolment has declined by 2.89 per cent.
“The enrolment rate of PWDs stands at 18.94 per cent of the eligible voting population. Registration of Kenyans living is diaspora constitutes 0.05 per cent of the register of voters,” said Mr Chebukati.
He said 10 counties were affected by abnormal transfer of voters including Nairobi, Wajir, Mandera, Garissa, and parts of Nyeri although the commission did not reveal affected numbers.
“We have our suspects, three officers, and we are finalising investigations before they are apprehended to face the law within the week,” said Mr Chebukati.
The IEBC boss added that the commission will make available, by pasting the hard copy of the register in each of the polling stations, seven days before August 9 for purposes of verification by voters. “However, voters can still continue verifying their details of registration with even SMS platform available,” he said.
Voters were to send their ID or passport numbers to the number 70000 to get details of where they are registered to vote. On the issue of 1.18 million anomalies identified by the KPMG audit, 246,465 deceased voters were deactivated from the register. However, of the 226,143 with ID and passport mismatch, only 24 per cent had been acted upon and deactivated as a majority require verification by the registration officers.
Nonetheless, Mr Marjan said the use of biometric identification during election will mitigate the risk of illegitimate voters to vote.
For the 481,711 with duplicated or blank ID or passport references, 144,674 are still in the register, after only 70 per cent were acted upon and deactivated.
For 164,269 records with invalid document reference, 145,855 still exist in the register after only 11 per cent were acted upon and deactivated. Mr Marjan said the records of 12,435 regarded as invalid were actually valid as they were old generation passports that the Directorate of Immigration Services was not maintaining in their inventory.
“The rest were as a result of key stroke errors that can be mitigated through use of biometric identification during the election.”
Mr Chebukati said the KPMG report, handed to the commission on June 18, will be shared with Parliament.
