Police won’t access BVR data, says Hassan

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has dismissed rumours that data derived from the electoral register will be shared with law enforcement agencies.

The commission is making a big push to boost the number of voters registered before the process closes on Tuesday and has organised a series of marathons to drum up support for the process across the country.

One obstacle it has faced is a persistent myth spread by those trying to suppress the number of eligible citizens enrolling to vote that the detailed data mined by the commission will be shared with the police.

IEBC chairman Issack Hassan said those claims were unfounded.

Proprietary information

Mr Hassan told the Sunday Nation the information obtained from the process would be used solely by the commission.

“The data is encrypted. That means if you load it on to a flash disk and go and attempt to open it on another machine you will see gibberish. You can’t work with it outside our system. This is proprietary information owned solely by the commission.”

Mr Hassan urged voters to disregard claims that the data would be shared with the police.

“A commission’s biggest asset is its register. It is what we use to ensure the integrity of elections and we certainly would not want to misuse that data in any way, shape or form. We are independent from the government. If the government wants to have similar data, it will have to implement the Integrated Population Registration System (IPRS). It will not get data from the IEBC.”

The IEBC is for the first time using Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits to enrol voters.

That system is expected to yield the cleanest register Kenya has had since independence, devoid of the names of dead voters which past reports claimed were used to raise the number of votes of candidates.

The IEBC has been working to drive up the number of voters registering to take part in the first election under the new Constitution. Two voter educators have also been retained to work in every ward in the country.

Mr Hassan says he is reasonably happy about the preparations for the elections so far.

“I am satisfied with where we are. Our biggest hurdle was voter registration, and that is progressing well. What we need is for Parliament to speedily conclude amending the electoral laws then we will be able to communicate clearly to candidates on what the requirements to take part in the election are.”

Mr Hassan says registration of voters has picked up after a slow start and that voter education has helped to roll back the public’s initial hesitancy amid unfounded rumours in some parts of the country, especially at the Coast, that the BVR kits may cause impotence or cancer.

The IEBC chair told voters the sole reason they were using the new method of registration was to achieve a clean register that would increase the integrity of the elections.

Mr Hassan, who was the mission leader of a team of observers from the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa in Ghana, saw firsthand some of the challenges the BVR kits can pose in an election.

Unlike Kenya, Ghana decided to go fully electronic in its election process.

Mr Hassan’s mission concluded that the Ghanaian election broadly met “regional, continental, and international standards for credible and transparent elections”.

However, there were multiple problems, especially with the use of electronic voter identification machines to identify voters.

Machines failed in several polling centres, and the election had to be extended to a second day.

Mr Hassan said that the IEBC would be ready to deal with such failures of the devices known as “pollbooks” that will be used to identify voters in the March election.

“The pollbook is a hand-held machine which operates on a battery. You put a new battery after every six hours. We will load data into it reflecting all the names of the people registered at each centre. If those machines fail, we will have a provision for a fail-safe manual printout in colour showing the details of the voters. In Ghana, they decided to go fully digital and had to use BVR by hook or crook. That is what caused some problems.”

Paper ballots

Mr Hassan said that voters would use paper ballots as they always had in past elections but the electronic kits will be used for voter identification.

The IEBC boss was also part of a 50-strong African delegation invited to observe the American election. He says the lesson he drew from it is that political parties can play a huge role in mobilising voters.

“The Obama campaign put together one of the most sophisticated ‘get out the vote’ operations the country has ever seen. They knew where their supporters were and they mobilised to get them to the polling stations. I remember meeting a black man who was very humbled because a young, white kid showed up at his doorstep, asked if he had voted and said there was a bus outside which could take people to the polling station.”

Mr Hassan said the faith Americans have in their institutions is something Kenya should aspire to emulate.