Parties yet to seize chance to recruit voters

For the last few weeks, the electoral commission has been working hard to get eligible voters to register to take part in the March 4 elections.

Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission chief Issack Hassan has been doing the media rounds, urging Kenyans not to miss out on the chance to exercise their democratic right.

He took this message recently to the Koch FM community radio station in Korogocho and urged slum dwellers to play their role in the electoral process.

The IEBC has, of course, been playing its statutory role in urging voters to register.

Yet the curious thing is that the players with a direct stake in the process — political parties and their candidates — have been largely absent from the effort to recruit voters.

This could be an indication that the campaign teams of the key candidates for president, governor, senator, MP and other seats did not learn some of the most important lessons from Barack Obama’s widely lauded and highly successful presidential campaign.

In the scores of articles analysing the factors that contributed to Mr Obama’s surprisingly comfortable victory over Republican challenger Mitt Romney, one issue that stands out is that Mr Obama did not win the campaign on Election Day but in the months leading up to the election.

The campaign’s voter-targeting effort largely followed the ethnic lines that will be familiar to many Kenyans. The President’s team knew that his support was running strong among members of the Latino and black communities.

So the campaign went flat out to encourage them to vote early, meaning that by the time Election Day came round, Mr Obama held a comfortable lead in key states such as Ohio.

The final vote tallies also showed huge turnouts among blacks who made up 13 per cent of the electorate. Among Latinos, he comfortably secured 73 per cent of their votes.

In the 50 United States, all but one–North Dakota–require some form of registration, that many will accept on election day. Voter trurnout is one of the most crucial factors in determining who wins.

In an interview with The Atlantic magazine, Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director, said the team decided to take a scientific approach in the effort to lure more voters to take part in the process.

With Twitter, one of the company’s former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically send individual users direct messages.

“We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff,” said Mr Goff.

“Meanwhile, the teams also built an opt-in Facebook outreach programme that sent people messages saying, essentially, ‘Your friend, Dave in Ohio, hasn’t voted yet. Go tell him to vote.’

Goff described the Facebook tool as ‘the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that’s come around in years, since the phone call.’ ”

CNN analyst James Carville, who was a top aide to President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, said the Obama team showed how important political recruitment is in determining whether one wins an election or not.

“They connected people in a way that had never been done before with Facebook,” Mr Carville told Rolling Stone magazine.

“If they knew I was an undecided voter, they also knew I was in the Marine Corps and they’d have a retired gunnery sergeant call me to get me to vote. It was way far above anything that’s ever been tried in politics before. Political scientists will mine this data forever.”

The results were ultimately displayed in President Obama’s landslide victory, where he beat Mitt Romney 332 to 206 in the Electoral College and became only the third president to twice win more than 50 per cent of the popular vote in 100 years.

In Kenya, political parties have been slow to mount aggressive efforts to urge their supporters to register, leaving the task to the IEBC.

Some of the few intensive campaigns have been witnessed at the Coast where there are efforts to counter the Mombasa Republican Council’s campaign of intimidation against the exercise.

Elsewhere, it has been a tale of low turnout.

“I was recently in Ijara Constituency in North Eastern Kenya. Our clerks were sitting under a tree with all their equipment. By the time I passed by in the evening, they had registered only one voter,” IEBC commissioner Mohamed Alawy said on Thursday.

Mr Alawy challenged the media to concentrate on voter registration instead of focusing on alliances, which would be meaningless without voters.

“You are focusing more on alliances. Every day we read or watch stories of who will join who in the race to State House. Have the media paused for a minute and asked themselves who will vote for these alliances if registration of voters continues at this pace?” he asked.

That question might also be pondered by the candidates who draw large crowds yet pay little attention to whether their supporters are registered or not.