The Kenyan election is complete, with Uhuru Kenyatta emerging victorious in the much-anticipated polls. But with all the coverage of the technological aspects of the election, from the Google Election hub to biometric voter registration, how effectively was technology utilised in this crucial vote?
HumanIPO reporters Gabriella Mulligan and Vince Matinde debate whether the 2013 election really was revolutionised by technology in the way many thought it would be.
The case for: Gabriella Mulligan
Technology was widely used in the recent Kenyan election process to great effect, highlighting the potential of technology to promote awareness, disseminate information, and encourage public engagement.
In the run up to the elections, all the candidates flocked to the internet and social media in order to communicate with the population, with Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga being revealed to be in the top ten most active African politicians on social media.
A new online elections portal was also launched, which saw news and information from multiple sources aggregated for users’ convenience; and YouTube launched a bespoke elections channel providing relevant content which proved very popular especially with diaspora voters – both projects promoting dissemination of information.
The technology-based interest was two-way, with the candidates topping search trends on Google, showing the population eagerly used the internet for information on the candidates.
Multiple elections-related apps – including games and SMS-based apps – were launched, encouraging a peaceful election process, while crowd-sourced incident reporting sites also proved important throughout the elections, with developers reaching out to include all segments of society across Kenya.
Despite some glitches in constituency count transmissions to the central talling station in Nairobi, the multiplicity of tech-based initiatives throughout the election process provided endless benefit, and Kenya led the way in how technology can support successful and peaceful elections.
The case against: Vince Matinde
The failure of biometric kits swings a pound of doubt as to whether it was an effective way of handling the huge number of voters who turned up at various polling stations. This failure caused voting to go on for hours, beyond the stipulated mandated time and many polling stations reverted back to the manual register.
After hours of waiting for the results, the IEBC confirmed that it would go back to the manual tally after the failure of the transmission of provisional results during the elections. The provisional results being relayed using specialised mobile phones from Safaricom was to help the public to get presidential results before having the final results in just 48 hours.
Out of hundreds of innovators in Kenya only three main websites bothered to configure the IEBC API to relay information. OpinionYetu could not cope with the demand the public had for information and went under for a few hours. The others, Uchaguzi and Nation Media, had their sites configured to relay provisional results but that dream did not last as IEBC reverted to manual tallying.
Kenyans are still skeptical about the employment of technology to run sensitive processes such as the elections. The rumours abounding on the safety of the electronic relay of results dented the public’s image of technology as an enabler in developing countries. Some people feel Kenya is still a long way from adequately adopting electronic voting.
