Let’s look for middle ground in electoral laws debate

The country is losing precious time to prepare for the 2017 General Election. Last week, MPs failed to agree on an amendment to the electoral laws. While Jubilee supports a back-up manual voting system, the Opposition is worried that it will lead to manipulation of election results.

Opposition says manual system will allow absentee voters to vote. It also insists on electronic transmissions of results from the polling centres.

The ruling coalition has responded by claiming that in some rural areas, there is no mobile network coverage. They say a manual back-up the voters’ register should be used just in case biometric voter identification kits do not work.

Conspiracy theories aside, there are genuine concerns over the reliability of both systems. For voters in remote areas, there is a need to assure them that their votes will count, regardless of the availability of mobile network and/or electricity. On the other hand, all voters want a free and fair election that allows them to continue with normal life in the shortest time possible after the election.

We can save everyone’s time by looking for a middle ground that addresses the concerns of all the stakeholders. The issues at hand are three namely; establishment of a biometric voter registration system, electronic voter identification and electronic transmission of results.

The biometric voter registration was successfully implemented in the 2013 voter registration and it is expected to be successful considering that voter registration takes place over several days and any issues arising out of this can be addressed before the exercise is concluded.

We need to address two issues. The earliest failure of the 2013 election systems occurred during the electronic voter identification. There are lessons to learn from 2013. Lack of electrical power was one of the reasons for failure. Secondly, some voters’ names were missing from the local database in the polling station kits.

To avoid the issue of missing names from the electronic system, it would be wise to countercheck the electronic system against the manual printouts on a name by name basis to ensure that all names on the manual register are on the electronic systems.

IEBC has sufficient time to ensure this exercise is completed. Let’s have voter register verification done using local databases in voter identification kits. That way, missing names will be identified way in advance and there would be no surprises come election day. On the issue of charging the gadgets, that is an operational issue that IEBC must see to. With these done, I believe all parties can confidently rely on the BVR kits.

While it is true that some areas of the country are very remote, there is a way to work around this issue. Polling stations can be allowed to tally the results manually, but then the results are presented to the constituency-level tallying center where they are compiled and transmitted electronically to the national tallying centre. We owe ourselves a credible and peaceful election and both are possible.