K e n y a ’s 2 0 1 3 e l e c t i o n : L e s s o n s f o r d emo c r a c y p r omo t i o n Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14 25 of the credibility of political processes has the potential to threaten the consolidation of democracy in the longer-term. Finding a balance between peace and political competition is necessary if countries are to actually achieve a lasting peace that is not simply the absence of violence, but is based on more cohesive inter-ethnic relations and broad public confidence in the rules of the game. Technologies and implementation The IEBC succeeded in the immense logistical task of establishing, staffing and equipping some 34,000 polling streams. However, the new technology introduced to safeguard the electoral process failed during the voting and tallying processes. Three new processes had been introduced to protect against rigging. First, voters were to be biometrically registered using their fingerprints to ensure that no individual could register more than once. Second, voters were to be biometrically verified – in other words, in order to vote individuals would have to prove their identity by providing the same fingerprint that was registered on file. Third, the election results were to be transmitted from the polling station level as soon as they had been counted using a specially designed mobile phone application, creating a provisional set of results that could then be used to detect any manipulation of the results when they were aggregated at the constituency and national level. However, while biometric registration led to Kenya’s cleanest register to date, the electronic identification and transmission of votes collapsed. In addition, key elements of scrutiny slipped, including the removal of election observers from the national tallying centre. The observers were subsequently re-admitted, but only to a vantage point from which they could not verify the numbers tallied. Despite this they made no public statement at the time, creating the public impression that they had enjoyed full access. A number of lessons can be drawn from this experience. First, high public confidence in the IEBC prior to the elections owed much to the introduction of new technology, which in this sense contributed to a peaceful poll. However, the use of new technology in and of itself does not ensure the credibility of the election and the collapse of such systems can undermine confidence in the electoral system even if no actual rigging takes place. Second, the Kenyan case shows how the introduction of new technology requires significant preparation and testing. There are two important issues here: the ease with which technology can be tampered with to support electoral manipulation, and basic logistical challenges. But this does not mean that technology cannot be used. There was nothing specific to Kenya that made it inevitable that the technology would fail. Mobile phone companies engage in a more complex array of transactions every day. Rather, the new technology did not work because of a lack of basic planning and testing, and as a result would most likely have failed in any country in the world. Third, faith in new technology fostered a sense of complacency and led people to give insufficient attention to the credibility of electoral processes before and during the election. The most extensive election monitoring was conducted by the domestic Election Observer Group (ELOG), which, among other things, conducted a parallel vote tabulation (PVT) or an exit poll. However, a margin of error of plus or minus three per cent in the context of a close election meant that the PVT was unable – despite claims to the contrary – to validate the electoral result because it showed that Kenyatta could plausibly have polled anywhere from 46.7 per cent to 52.7 per cent. International election observation teams could also have done more to alert the public to the restrictions placed on their activities and will need to consider whether their long silence in between reports is suitable in countries in which the credibility of the polls changes by the day. Conclusions The lessons of Kenya’s most recent election are thus mixed. Perhaps the most important lesson however, is the difficulty of predicting with any certainty the direction or extent of progress or decline in the quality of election administration. In short, processes of democratisation are not clear-cut or linear, but the result of complex and interrelated processes. Institutional reform is likely to mean little if democratic norms are not instilled and the political elite are not provided with the necessary incentives to play by the rules of the game. Democracy is not something that is immediately created by the adoption of a new constitution, but a political ideal that needs to constantly be fostered and supported. Gabrielle Lynch is an associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on ethnic identities and politics, elections and democratisation, and reconciliation and transitional justice efforts in contemporary Kenya. She is the author of numerous journal articles and a monograph – I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin of Kenya – published by the University of Chicago Press. Nic Cheeseman is a university lecturer in African politics at Oxford University. He works on comparative politics and democratisation and specialises in the politics of Kenya and Zambia. His articles have appeared in African Affairs, the Journal of Modern African Studies, Democratization and the Journal of Democracy. His first monograph, Democracy in Africa, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Justin Willis is a historian of Africa and works on the modern history of eastern Africa. He is a professor in history at Durham University and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute.
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