House to use digital voting system in 2013
Voting in the next Parliament will be done electronically.
According to a draft of the Standing Orders of the National Assembly seen by the Nation, members will cast their votes by swiping their cards on the slots provided.
But they will only use electronic voting when a dispute arises over which side shouted loudest between the ‘Ayes’ and ‘Noes’.
This is one of the measures that Parliament has adopted to ensure the speedy execution of legislative functions especially when the number of representatives increases from the current 224 to 418 in 2013 –350 for the National Assembly and 68 for the Senate.
The exercise, which when done manually has been taking between 20 and 40 minutes of Parliamentary time, will take a maximum of five minutes.
Live results
“At the expiry of five minutes or as soon as the result of the voting appears on the indicator board, the Speaker …shall announce the results forthwith,” the House rules direct.
The new voting system has three buttons to allow MPs to cast their vote from the comfort of their Sh200,000-a-piece seats.
One button is to vote “Yes”, another for “No”, and another for “abstain”. It also has a slot for the card.
The card has a magnetic stripe encoded with the details of the MP including the name, constituency, party and other details.
Once the MPs insert their respective cards in a slot, the board is activated and they can cast their vote “live”.
The results will show on the Speaker’s indicator board. Once the time allotted for voting expires, the Speaker will then be obliged to announce the results.
Any MP who forgets the card or whose console breaks down or who “is unable to cast their vote due to any reason considered sufficient by the Speaker” shall have to vote “verbally” before the Speaker announces results.
If, say, an MP is confused by the technology and instead of voting “Yes” votes “No”, the MP can appeal to the Speaker to have the vote “altered”.
Any MP who is in the House at the time of voting, but who does not cast his vote, shall be considered to have abstained.
In the event of technical hitches or power failure the Speaker may direct the House to another electronic voting or proceed to a roll call voting.
The latter is the manual voting process that MPs currently use.
