Executive Summary
This second edition of the Ready or Not election preparedness report series, developed in partnership by the Africa Centre for Open Governance (AfriCOG) and Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (KPTJ), focuses on an assessment of the key activities of the electoral cycle between April and June 2017 and offers an evaluation of the key vulnerabilities in voting, tallying, results announcement and electoral dispute resolution phases of the electoral process.
Overall, the assessment finds that with less than one month remaining
until voters go to the polls, there are several issues of serious
concern:
Legal Reform
The most serious issues related to legal reform in the current electoral cycle include the following:
- i) Parliament’s failure to pass court-ordered legislation to operationalise constitutional provisions regarding gender parity leaves the country vulnerable to illegal elective and appointive bodies.
- ii) The Public Procurement Oversight Authority (PPOA) found fault with the IEBC’s procurement of ballot printing services and there is pending litigation on the matter. These decisions are critical to the integrity of the electoral process. This leaves the IEBC to deal with the challenge of implementing these rules effectively and educating voters about what to expect in a timely and efficient manner. Allegations of the IEBC’s mismanagement of procurement processes deeply risk threatening public confidence in the Commission as well as in the integrity of the ballots. Given the procurement scandals that haunted the 2013 election, it is of great concern that little seems to have changed in this regard.
- iii) There are pending questions related to the new elections regulations. These include the unclear status of the IEBC’s online portal for polling station results, a lack of information regarding what the Commission will use as a “complementary mechanism” if the electronic results transmission system fails, and gaps in the rules for when polling station results can be disregarded.