Register More Voters

If I recall right, Kenya did not get such a bad name by the failure to register enough voters. In fact the opposite happened! There were more registered voters than living Kenyans.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read that political parties gathered for breakfast with Kenya's Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC) and all they could say - out of a million burning issues - was "please register more voters".

Why is it that Kenyans never want to learn from mistakes? Why can't the IIEC simply address the reasons Kenyans got rid of the Kivuitu team in a hurry?

Let me be part of the solution:

Multiple Registration:

This is not just a RCB problem (courtesy of a certain moderator), it is a perfect Kenyan problem. People go to different parts of the country to register over and over so that on election day, one such individual is capable of electing an MP single handedly. The process where human beings go through the entire register manually to detect and remove multiple registrations is simply not up to the job.

Solutions:

1. Computerize the voters' roll
2. Introduce biometric registration where the finger print and/ or eye of the voter combine with the name and face to positively identify a voter with no margin of error
3. Introduce 2 above at every polling station
4. There should be a paper trail in addition to all this above in event of a dispute

Somebody is going to mention cost. To that person I ask, how much does your life and that of your child cost? In any event we are now paying out billions to commissions to fix what transparent ballot boxes could have prevented.

I expect an IIEC that would stay a head of modern technology. The Kivuitu team not only feared technology, it hated any moderate advances in electoral practices.