The postmortem of the BVR electoral system: A realist’s perspective

Just hours after the Kenyan Supreme court made  a landmark ruling that validated Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto’s victory as the president and vice president elect, thousands of tongues were left wagging, wondering whether justice had been delivered or not.

Prime minister Raila Odinga told a press conference that he will abide by the ruling, as civil society groups called for an audit of the electoral system, in particular the failed Biometric Voter Registration and the Electronic Voter Identification Devices whose failure in the poll were described as “systemic”.

According to the civil societies, the Independent electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) ought to have told Kenyans what happened to the machines and whether they were faulty or not, in order to quash similar failures in future.

This writer looks at the mathematics, the facts and ergonomics that made the BVR system a complete failure in Kenyan polls, in The BVR postmortem.

The facts:

·         IEBC listed the number of registered voters to be roughly 14 Million.

·         It also confirmed that each and every voter could take a minimum of 10 minutes to cast their votes

·         That only 12 Million voters actually cast their votes.

The assumptions:

·         That the BVR system worked perfectly.

·         That most Kenyans even the illiterate took a maximum of 10 minutes to vote.

·         That all systems worked

The postmortem:

·         Let’s take the 14 million voters and multiply that with 10 minutes to get the number of minutes that all voters could take to cast their ballots.

14,000,000 * 10­= 140,000,000 minutes

·         Let’s consider the number of polling stations.

·         There are 45,000 polling stations, each with approximately h seven clerks

Therefore: 45,000*7=315,000 clerks

·         Let us divide the minutes with the number of polling clerks

140,000,000 minutes/315,000=444 minutes

·         Divide this with 60 minutes to get the number of hours

444.444/60=7.40 hours

·         All things remaining constant, it could have taken us roughly seven hours to vote.

But!  It took most Kenyans in several parts of the country 6 to 7 hours to cast their ballot.

So what went wrong?

I can bet that the IEBC took the issue of civic education so loosely and handled it in kid gloves.

It was clear that most polling clerks, their superiors and most people could not operate the machines, leave alone leading their equally unendowed countrymen to successfully be identified or even use the machines to vote.

In some instances, no one could remember the passwords for the BVR machines, therefore keeping voters waiting for hours on end.

The failure was not purely systemic but was coupled with the fact that most Kenyans have a small grasp of technology.

Even if a forensic audit is conducted on the machines as requested by the petitioners in the case against the IEBC, the machines will still work, even today! That is my two pence.