Mapping Election discrepancies

Kenya recently marked one year after the 2013 polls. It is common fact that the election went on peacefully though several questions remain unanswered to date. As per the constitution,  for one to be validly elected, the winner must garner more than 50 percent plus 1 of the total votes cast.

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{Need to figure a way to embed html elements on this blog!!!}

Can be accessed here

One year down the line, I have decided to look at the events before the election. Mainly the voter registration statistics. Compare these statistics against the numbers used on the election day. The 2013 election was one of the most contested on all fronts. From the use of social media, the use of cleaver PR strategies to plain political schemes which may not be easily identifiable on the surface. Take for instance, the push by member of certain areas forcing members of their communities to register.  A simple example was to the lead up to the election, bus conductors would request to see one’s voters card to be eligible to catch the bus(matatu) to their destination. This of course pushed the registration numbers in favor of certain politicians. A counter argument could be made that,  other communities that were as not hands on around voter registration have no right to complain of such tactics. One year down the line, politicians who suffered from this maneuver are asking citizens to forgo family planning in-order to increase their political base in future.  This is indeed shallow as those most likely to be born would not be eligible to vote for the next eighteen years.  Also not forgetting the fast changing political dynamic.

Other claims made by the former prime minister, is that the election was stolen yet again.  He points to the several errors that occurred at the hands of the electoral commission. One of the errors he states was the systematic failure of the biometric voter kits which did not work on the election day, resulting in the use of manual registers. The other error cited was the failure of the results transmission system which run into data drive capacity issues. Rumor was rife that other candidates hacked into the Electronic Transmission System(ETS), and managed to interfere with the results. Since then the electoral commission has insisted on the integrity of the elections, and given the supreme court ruling upholding the election of Uhuru, Kenyatta was sworn in as the president of the country.

As per the constitution, the electoral commission is mandated to produce documentary evidence of the election results from each polling station and stream. This data from these forms constitute what they refer to as final election results. On the other hand, the results submitted by the electronic system are referred to as provisional until the results submitted are accompanied by the Form 34 A which is also signed by party agents. Sadly, One year down the line not all forms have been presented to the electoral body, or as the body put is, they have no clue on the whereabouts of the mission forms. On inspecting some of the forms, some were edited poorly and it is not clear if the integrity of the results as per the forms is what actually transpired.

To better understand if these forms could indicate a level of injustice, I decided to scrap all the forms and look at election streams without forms. This process then involved looking at if the numbers in the forms add up to the final results announced by the electoral commission. It is understandable that there could be calculation errors though some errors are clearly glaring. On analysis, there are a total or 2585 missing forms.  Only two administrative units did not have any missing forms. The visualisation below shows missing forms as per those submitted by the electoral body, and the gradient indicated missing unaccounted valid votes. How did I arrive at the valid unaccounted votes? The electoral commision also published presidential results for each and every administrative boundary. On comparison with the Form 34 A , the candidates must get the indicated votes in total to justify the numbers published by the electoral body.

 

1 thought on “Mapping Election discrepancies

  1. Sorry about the embed problems, sometimes you need to toggle between editing modes to get iframes to work.

    I love the use of the map and important issue you are illustrating with the data. In your last paragraph you tell us what the size of the bubbles and colors on the map indicate, but I jumped to the map before reading the piece and the legend didn’t tell me what those were so I was a bit lost and had to wait until the last paragraph. It would be good to both front-load that information in the article to tell us what your data are indicating. I’m still unclear on the gradient though.

    It would be helpful to give some more context as to how the forms and votes work with regard to election counts in Kenya, so that we can be sufficiently outraged!

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