The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has stated that manual registers will be used only if digital registers fail to function properly.
IEBC commissioner Abdi Guliye stated during an engagement meeting with members of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) that this will comply with a ruling issued by the court of appeal in 2017.
The commissioner spoke a day after Azimio La Umoja One Kenya presidential candidate Raila Odinga declared “no manual register, no elections,” sparking a political uproar.
His main rival, Deputy President William Ruto of the United Democratic Alliance (UDA), has dismissed the demand, saying, “My competitor is scared of defeat, why is he insisting on a manual register?”
The commission announced on Thursday that it had doubled the number of Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) kits in case some of them failed to function.
“This time we are saying instead of three kits as were the case in 2017 per ward, we have doubled them to six kits. If there is a total failure, we will replace the kits. If it fails, we will bring the third kit. Assuming all the kits are not working, that is the time when we can revert to a manual register,” he added.
He urged politicians to stop playing with citizens’ emotions because the information on the digital register is similar to that on the manual register.
“The manual register that people are complaining about is printed out of the digital register. So, it is not coming from the moon. There will be no way you will be in the manual register which is in the book and not be in the digital register,” he added.
Guliye also hinted that the manual register allows for election rigging, but the commission wants to close this loophole because anyone can easily claim they voted by feeding their data from the manual register to the kits.
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