How voter education enhances democracy and peaceful polls

IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati(right) and British High Commission Governance and Security Advisor Nikolai Hutchinson flag off Voters Education awareness track during IEBC Annual Voter Education Week at Bomas of Kenya on Monday, June 14, 2021. [Boniface Okendo, Standard]

The media continues to report dismal performance by Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) in voter registration.

Journalists attribute IEBC’s spectacular failure to reach its target of six million voters, 1.5 million weekly for four weeks, to failure to plan, inadequate budget and no voter education.

IEBC has registered under one million voters and is said spent over 1.2 billion for this exercise. This is expensive calculated as the cost of registration per voter. Lack of planning demonstrates that if you fail to plan you clearly plan to fail.

Comprehensive planning is critical in every activity and aspect of the electoral cycle. That is why strategic planning is indispensable in elections. Planning helps IEBC identify what needs to be done for example, in voter registration; determine how much it will cost, how long it will take, the key stakeholders or players, what roles and responsibilities will each have, the levels of collaboration or partnership required and in what locations.

Planning also provides targets and how to know when they are being achieved or not. Planning also helps stakeholders see the roadmap, share stakes and objectives and ensures broad ownership of the electoral processes and their outcomes.

Voter education deals with the electoral cycle and process such as how, when and why to register as a voter and vote, the link between basic human rights and voting rights; the role, responsibilities and rights of voters; the relationship between elections and democracy and the conditions necessary for democratic elections; secrecy of the ballot; why each vote is important and its impact on public accountability; and how votes translate into seats. Voter education requires more lead time for implementation than voter information and, ideally, should be undertaken on an on-going basis. Voter information is the basic information enabling qualified citizens to vote, including the date, time, and place of voting; the type of election; identification necessary to establish eligibility; registration requirements; and mechanisms for voting. These constitute basic facts about the election and do not require the explanation of concepts. Messages will be developed for each new election.

Voter education and engagement of stakeholders are most important activities in the electoral cycle. In fact, the success is determined by the level of voter education provided prior to the activity; voter registration, boundary delimitation, review of electoral boundaries, nomination, and campaigns.

Therefore, while planning and sufficient budgets are important; without voter education we shall continue to see apathy in our electoral cycle. In many countries, the Elections Management Body (EMB) plays the role of coordinating and facilitating voter education including design and development of VE curricula, which is usually done collaboratively. The business of continuously educating citizens to participate in electoral processes is collaborative. This is important because such collaboration ensure wider reach and more involvement by stakeholders. The business of elections has many stakeholders without whose robust engagement by IEBC, apathy in elections will always persist.

Voters are key stakeholders in elections as are civil society (civic/voter education providers, observers), media, political parties, candidates, government agencies, donors etc; who must share common interests, enthusiasm and objectives with IEBC and should have confidence and trust in each other. These enhance credibility and acceptance of results.

Perhaps if IEBC had planned better collaborations, working closely with other government agencies and voter education providers, the number of registered voters would have been definitely higher using the same budget they have used.

There are many potential voters out there with ID cards and passports who have not registered as voters despite the billions spent. It is clear that voter education would have made a great difference. This is why it baffles many that IEBC, knowing that it lacked sufficient funding, had not conducted adequate voter education, still mounted an expensive voter registration campaign now and not later.