Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna has raised concerns regarding the constitutional right to vote for serving police and security officers deployed away from their registered stations during elections.
The problem he is describing
Voting in Kenya happens at the polling station where you registered. Police officers and other security personnel are deployed on election day to wherever they are needed, which is frequently hundreds of kilometres from that station. The result is that a large group of public servants secures an election they cannot take part in.
The same issue affects election officials, some medical staff on duty and prisoners, and it has been raised before every recent general election without a settled solution.
What the options are
Two remedies are usually proposed. Early or special voting for officers on duty, which has been used in some jurisdictions and requires the commission to run a separate secure process days ahead. Or dispersed voting, which lets an officer vote at the station where they are posted, which is administratively harder because the ballot papers for their own constituency are somewhere else.
Both need a legal amendment and money in the commission’s budget, which is why the idea keeps resurfacing and then lapsing.
The Kibra angle
Kibra sees heavy security deployment at every election, and its residents have their own registration problem in the same family: people who moved wards, lost an ID or registered years ago at a station they no longer live near. A transfer of registration is free and takes minutes when the commission’s registers are open, and almost nobody does it until election week.
KNN will publish the transfer and registration steps when the next enhanced registration window opens.
What we are watching
Whether a bill is actually drafted, what the electoral commission says it would cost, and whether the same fix covers election officials and other workers on duty.
Read the full report at AllAfrica News: Kenya
Source: AllAfrica News: Kenya
