How technology in elections can be used to increase public confidence

An excellent exhibition entitled “Voting matters: Citizenship and technologies of African elections” opened this week at the Nairobi National Museum.

The exhibition features campaign materials, photographs of political rallies and polling, and examples of changing electoral technologies from across Africa.

It was created by the French Institute for Research in Africa (Ifra) and National Museums of Kenya in collaboration with the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Institut Français.

The exhibition runs until November 8 and highlights the centrality of elections to contemporary politics.

At one level, campaign paraphernalia — from t-shirts and caps to kangas and posters — reminds us of how the ballot box provides the most common means for selecting political representatives, and the huge amount of time and money candidates and supporters invest in winning.

At another level, the exhibition — and particularly the material from polling stations — highlights how elections are about much more than this.

As Prof Justin Willis from Durham University argued in a linked workshop, elections are also a time when an idealised separation between citizens and the state is enacted.

More specifically, they are a time when crowds are individualised and identified; and are encouraged to be orderly and to select leaders who will serve the national interest.

INTRODUCE NEW TECHNOLOGIES

They simultaneously provide an opportunity for the state to display its ability to manage and oversee a complex process, ensure peace, and to insist upon a popular acceptance of final results.

As a result, elections have the capacity to be transformative: new leaders can come to power; but the process itself can also help to enact an ideal of citizenship and stateness and to legitimise key institutions.

At the same time — and as Kenyans are all too aware — elections can be disastrous: state institutions can be undermined in the face of popular perceptions of widespread incompetence, irregularities or malpractice; and violence can be used as a political tool, or can erupt as a result of popular anger.

Significantly, one way that states have tried to ensure that elections are transformative (rather than disastrous) is to periodically introduce new technologies.

However, as discussed by participants in a pre-exhibition roundtable: technology can help to increase public confidence in electoral processes; but it can also fail or be used to steal an election and can quickly become a source of public suspicion if it is believed to have been manipulated by the humans that manage it.

A critical question therefore — for states across the continent, but also for Kenya in the lead up to 2017 — is how the technologies that are adopted can be employed in ways that increase public confidence?

Lessons can be taken from history.

In Ghana, changes in technology have been made in between each general election from 1992 to date; an evolution that is commonly linked to a widespread perception that the quality of the country’s elections has improved with each successive poll.

PUBLIC CONFIDENCE

Similarly, in Kenya, the introduction of new technology in 2013 clearly contributed to the IEBC’s high confidence rankings.

Yet, it is not just the presence of new technology that is important in these examples, but the way in which it was introduced.

For example, in Ghana, changes in electoral technology have consistently stemmed from consultations between political party representatives and the Electoral Commission through the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (Ipac).

A process that has encouraged public agreements between, and public commitments by key players.

In Kenya, the introduction of biometric registration, and electronic verification and transmission of results, occurred in the context of broader reforms that followed the inauguration of the 2010 Constitution.

In both instances, the introduction of new technology helped increase public confidence because it emerged from processes widely regarded as progressive.

The lesson: technology can help to increase public confidence if it is believed to have been introduced for the right reasons by an institution that is committed to improving the quality of elections.

In turn, the task for the IEBC is to not only decide on which technology to use and to ensure that it works, but to also adopt working practices that help foster public confidence that electoral processes will be credible.