European Union election observer mission returns its verdict

By ABDIKADIR SUGOW        

The March 4 election was a success overall, but several lessons should be drawn from the difficulties that arose during the process, the European Union Election Observation Mission says in its final report.

However, the findings seem to disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling in at least one key area; the fact that it is not right to have several electoral registers.

The European election observers’ report says the voter register’s reliability was called into question just two days before polling. The Independent Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC) published lists detailing 36,236 registrations for which biometric data was not available.

The report says only after the announcement of election results did it emerge that these were not included in the overall figure of entries published earlier, or in the figures cited in the election results.

“In conjunction with inconsistent procedures for verifying registration on polling day, this separate list of voters contributed to some of the discrepancies that were later identified in the results,” reads the report, which was unveiled on Wednesday by Chief Observer Alojz Peterle.

The agency noted that the register was officially completed on February 20, and summaries of registration figures released a few days later, just ten days before polling. It listed 14,352,545 people, around 80 per cent of the targeted 18 million estimated to have national ID cards and corresponding to around 68 per cent of the voting age population.

Voter registers

The voter register was not the subject of controversy until after election day when its weaknesses led to the use of several different lists. The European Union report says the use of the voter register on election day did not allow consistently reliable records of registered citizens, nor of the number that had voted. It says following the failure of poll-books (laptops with a full voter register and a fingerprint-reading device), alongside difficulty in identifying voters in the correct polling stations, four different lists were used–and this included the register in poll-books, the lists printed for individual polling stations, the list of people whose biometric data had not been captured, and finally, the entries listed in the ‘green books’ – the manual records of entries made during voter registration.

The agency also noted that while the biometric voter registration process successfully registered 14.35 million Kenyans, the time allocated was insufficient to register all who were entitled to vote. The report says more than three million eligible voters were not registered and were therefore unable to vote. In addition, some Kenyan communities and marginalised groups remain disenfranchised as a result of not having national ID cards.

The mission proposes provision of mechanisms to ensure registration and voting for all eligible citizens, including prisoners and staff on duty on Election Day. It also recommends revision of policies on citizens’ registration and voter registration in order to provide more inclusivity for marginalised communities.