General News

Kenyans in Diaspora demand to vote in the 2017 general elections

Date: Nov 24, 2016

Kenyans living outside their motherland have asked the government to respect their right to vote in the general elections as provided for in the Constitution.

“We are asking the government to amend the law and allow for advance voting for several categories of Kenyans, including security forces, as well as in person voting for the Kenyans in Diaspora,” said Brian Weke, chairperson of the Elections Observation Group (ELOG).

Weke said that although there was no proper data on the number of Kenyans living outside the country, estimates from other sources such as the World Bank showed that about three million Kenyans lived in the Diaspora.

Weke said that the law was very clear about the right of every Kenyan who was eligible to vote be allowed to do so. He said the government had been slow in implementing this law and was therefore disenfranchising some of its citizens.

He made the remarks on Wednesday at the launch of a report by ELOG titled “The Other Electorate”, which captures a comparative analysis on diaspora voting by sampling many jurisdictions globally which have successfully carried out diaspora voting.

In Africa some of the countries sampled for early voting were Botswana, Ghana and South Africa, while in the West, Australia and the United Kingdom were sampled for the report.

Speaking to the African News Agency (ANA), the global chair of Kenyans in the diaspora, Dr Shem Ochuodho, advocated for electronic and mobile voting for Kenyans in the diaspora.

Dr Ochuodho said that just as Kenyans led the way in the mobile money transfer system, they should also harness mobile technology to ensure that all Kenyans eligible to vote, including those outside the country, could do so.

“Mobile voting is feasible if there is goodwill and less technophobia,” said Dr Ochuodho, adding that the concept of mobile voting, or M-voting, was already being tested at university level through the local students’ unions elections. He said Kenyan techies had already uploaded an App on Google Store called M-Kura for mobile voting experiments.

He said that with mobile voting the chances of rigging would be greatly reduced. He said that Kenyans in the diaspora should have at least two options, namely the M-Vote on mobile and the internet voting under I-Vote which was a secure internet voting system so that everyone was able to use the method best suited to their particular environment at the time of voting.

“The premise is that it is easier to rig in manual voting than in mobile voting,” said Dr Ochuodho, adding that if Kenyans could trust people to move their money via mobile phone, then it should be equally possible for them to trust mobile voting.

“M-Pesa brought to us financial inclusion. M-Vote will bring democratic inclusion,” Ochuodho said, while cautiously warning against the cursory manner in which the diaspora vote was regarded.

In the 2013 general elections the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), the body which conducts elections in Kenya, only managed to include Kenyans living in Tanzania and Uganda for voting, and even so, only in the presidential elections.

IEBC is putting in place plans to conduct mass voter registration for Kenyans within and without the country for the 2017 general elections.

According to the IEBC’s Elections Operations Plan (2015-2017), voter registration for citizens in the diaspora will be conducted in March 2017 while the elections are expected to be held in August the same year.

--ANA--

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