Our new tech explainer on election technologies in Kenya

We’ve published a new tech explainer on election technologies in Kenya. The explainer takes a deep dive into the technologies employed to manage and administer the election process in Kenya, such as biometric voter registration (BVR), voter identification, results transmission, and candidate management systems.

Electoral processes - along with elections themselves - are one of the largest government data-gathering exercises undertaken, making them susceptible to data exploitation and privacy violations.

States are increasingly employing technologies to coordinate the running of their electoral processes. Governments give various reasons for the use of these technologies - such as increasing transparency, facilitating voter identification, fighting corruption, and increasing confidence in election results.

But the databases and the devices used to facilitate electoral processes are vulnerable to abuse, manipulation, and theft. Moreover, technological failures can lead to erroneous results, the annulment of elections, or worse. These concerns, combined the potential for privacy violations and exploitation of data used in electoral processes, raise serious questions about if and when new election technologies should be deployed.

In our new tech explainer, we look at how Kenya’s post-election violence of 2007 led to sweeping changes in the management of the election process in the country, including the mass implementation of technologies into its election processes.

These technologies became collectively known as the Kenyan Integrated Elections Management System (KIEMS) and cover most stages of the electoral process.

We evaluate the technologies employed to operate KIEMS, which is comprised of the following:

• Candidate Registration Management
• Biometric Voter Registration
• Electronic Voter Identification
• Electronic Results Transmission

Election technologies have the potential to improve transparency and foster public trust in electoral systems. In Kenya, the deployment of election technologies was an attempt to foster trust in the voting process by partially eliminating the potential for human corruption.

However, the use of these technologies also raises concerns in relation to the safeguarding of (biometric) voter data, connectivity failures and subsequent results transmissions, as well as government procurement of election technologies provided by private companies.

For more information, read our full explainer on election technologies in Kenya. We’ve also put together some recommendations and factors to consider when election technologies are deployed.