Political parties wont accept electronic registers willingly, so force them

What you need to know:

  • Whereas the Registrar of Political Parties may have lists of who belongs to which party submitted by the parties themselves, very few parties believe in their own submissions.
  • Put differently, is the opaqueness and the fluid nature of party membership lists deliberate in order to provide the necessary fertile ground for voter manipulation and rigging?
  • Eventually, political parties will get the message that transparency, powered by technology in the electoral process pays

The ongoing primaries in both opposition and ruling parties have left a lot to be desired.

Candidates, voters, organisers and the political leadership are all blaming each other for what is simply an exercise that should have been well executed - had technology been allowed to play its role.

The opposition party ride on the excuse that they lack resources to spend on technology but the ruling party would find it hard to explain why they never deployed technology in their primaries.

Indeed Jubilee party had started off well by announcing their now widely-publicised ‘smart-card’ solution for registering party members and subsequently for validating the voters during the primaries.

Along the way, this plan to use technology was abandoned to give way to what politicians thrive on – manual operations – with their inherent problems.

That means simple questions, like who should vote in the primaries, suddenly become impossible to answer since political parties find themselves in the same situation they repeatedly accuse IEBC of – having multiple registers without knowing which one is comprehensive and complete.

Whereas the Registrar of Political Parties may have lists of who belongs to which party submitted by the parties themselves, very few parties believe in their own submissions.

Most political party registers were submitted to meet legal requirements rather than provide for a comprehensive list of bona-fide party members, meaning that whatever list was submitted might not be have been too useful in party primaries.

This is why many citizens were surprised to find that they belonged to parties they never imagined existed when they logged onto the registrar of political parties confirmation site.

FLUID NATURE

It has since been shut down to either sort out the lists or as a way of managing the complaints, but that is a story for another day.

For now, it is clear the political parties do not know whether to use the 2013 Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) register, the 2016 IEBC register, their legal but incomplete political party register or a mixture of all the above to validate who should be taking part in their party primaries.

That is sad, given that technology to invite, validate and register party members through mobile, web or physical means is widely available and well established.

Why then would political parties not embrace such technologies? Could it be that this technology would shine a sharp transparent light on the electoral process and drastically reduce the opportunities party leadership exploits in selecting, rather than electing, their preferred candidates?

Put differently, is the opaqueness and the fluid nature of party membership lists deliberate in order to provide the necessary fertile ground for voter manipulation and rigging?

Lack of a substantive voter or party register accords any one with sufficient resources to proceed to publish their own ‘local’ versions of party lists, ballot papers, party agents amongst others – given that that no one has the single source of truth about all these electoral items.

Additionally, there is no reliable mechanisms to independently verify or crosscheck who voted or who did not, given that voter identification mechanisms that rely only on national IDs or party IDs is not sufficient to address the notorious ballot-stuffing ‘attack’.

The probability of ghosts waking up to vote in Busia or in Kirinyaga becomes real in such circumstances, made possible by manual processes, and this after Kriegler and several other reports repeatedly informed us that it is very difficult to know who wins elections in the absence of electronic tools that can provide verification mechanisms through reliable audit trails.

REWARD PARTIES

Political parties have, therefore, failed the technology test within their primaries and now lack the moral authority to insist that IEBC use technology to deliver a credible general election this August.  

In any case, IEBC already has an escape route from having to use technology, by virtue of the amendment clause of the Elections 2016 Act  which allows them to use some yet to be defined ‘complimentary system’ to replace technology in the event of failure.

It is scary but we can say that the use, or better still, lack of technology in the primaries maybe a prelude of what the country should expect come the August 8 general election. Is it possible to make technology use mandatory for the political class?

Having technology in our legal statutes is a start, but was obviously not sufficient, given that laws can be changed at the whim of the same political class.  

The best way is for voters to reward parties that show increased transparency through technology, while punishing those that do not.

If you feel your party candidate was a product of a flawed, manual process, you will still have a chance in August to vote for the candidate of you choice –if they presented themselves as independent candidates.

Eventually, political parties will get the message that transparency, powered by technology in the electoral process pays, while opaqueness powered by manual processes is expensive and futile.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jwalu