Kenya on the right track to era of electronic voting, say IT experts
About Us Kenya ICT Press Kenya on the right track to era of electronic voting, say IT experts
Business Daily By GALGALLO FAYO
Tuesday, March 5 2013
The use of electronic devices to verify eligibility of voters and in the transmission of results has raised hopes that electronic voting could be introduced in the next General Election in 2017.
However, technical hitches with some of the electronic voter identification devices as Kenyans voted on Monday spoilt the party when the polls agency resorted to the manual register in the affected centres.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is increasingly turning to technological solutions to enhance credibility of voting and has assured it could start issuing provisional results 48 hours after closing of the polling stations.
The Constitution allows seven days within which final results should be released. There were 33,000 polling centres.
Cellulant chief executive officer Ken Njoroge, however, said use of technology would be gradual because of societal and infrastructure challenges.
“Society, mindset and trust is important. We are going to soon adopt electronic voting but that in my opinion is 10 to 15 years away,” Mr Njoroge said.
Despite Kenya having a fairly well educated population, Mr Njoroge said majority were yet to embrace technology to a level where electronic voting can replace physical presence.
Electronic voting would address logistical challenges, especially registering Kenyans outside the East African Community bloc.
IEBC has set up a tallying centre at the Bomas of Kenya to disseminate results to media houses as they are released. Mobile service provider Safaricom will provide the network to about 26,000 polling stations.
“The integrity of the Safaricom system has always been unquestioned. No one has ever broken into that system,” said Safaricom chief executive officer Bob Collymore in an earlier interview.
Media houses also relied heavily on technology for parallel tallying with journalists reporting from the field using mini-laptops.
On Monday, the public, journalists, media outlets, and observers converged on Twitter for updates with the hashtag #KenyaDecides.
Internet search giant Google launched the Kenya Elections Hub, a portal for tracking news, and March4 poll trends. With more than 14 million Internet users, Kenya becomes the third African country for Google to launch such a hub after Senegal and Ghana.