On 8th February, 2016, a group of Concerned Citizens unearthed issues with Uganda’s Electoral Commission (EC) Voter’s Register. Their investigation revealed 20,000 ghost voters in the final EC Voter’s Register, a staggering number: which equals 68% of the registered voters in Kalangala District, or 66% in Abim.
Chief among NEW revelations is that in cleaning the Voter Register of the 20,000 ghosts, the EC updated all but 3 districts. This would suggest that just under 98% of the districts had errors in their voter lists. The districts with the most glaring discrepancies being Kabarole, Arua, Nebbi, and Kibaale.
Further, in removing the 20,000 ghost voters, there are inexplicable increases in some district totals. It could well be that voters actually moved to a new district, but this isn’t helped by further and similar inconsistencies in the regularly uploaded EC voting data. It’s increasingly becoming clear that either the EC is seriously incapable or it is intentionally incompetent.
Only two days away from the polls, questions about how we end up with the 20,000 voters on the register and how EC expunged them after the issues were raised, remain. Further, questions on if issues with the voter register are issues of incompetence or deliberate actions symptomatic of a much bigger issue at the Electoral Commission.
Questions to ponder:
- How were the 20,000 ghost voters expunged from the registry?
- What is the implication of this data anomaly to the integrity of the Voter Register?
- Has the EC data ever been audited. If not, why hasn’t it been audited?
- What measures will the EC put in place to reassure Ugandans that such errors will not affect the integrity of the country’s voter registration process?
- What districts or polling stations were most affected by the deletion of the 20,000 voters?
Disturbed by these questions, a team of Concerned Citizens convened a digital hackathon to dig even deeper into the Electoral Commission’s data. The exercise has unearthed even more confusing questions. Data is data. When properly presented, it either answers questions or it raises questions. The EC’s data disproportionally raises more glaring questions than it satisfactorily answers.
Chief among the discovered anomalies is the discrepancy in the reported number of eligible voters the EC claimed to have registered. The November 2015 district statistics released by EC had the number of voters at 15,277,196. However, a subsequent report showed the number to be 15,277,198. A difference of 2 voters.
- Who were the 2 voters that were added to the registry and why were they added?
- Why only 2 when there are running reports of voters unable to find their names on the register even though they registered to vote?
In a July 24, 2015 New Vision article, EC claimed 16.2 million people would be eligible to vote in 2016. In the same article EC claimed that Uganda’s population was 35 million, meaning that roughly 43.6 percent of the country’s population above 18, the official voting age, were registered to vote.
However, in November 2015, EC released an updated list with 15,277,196 registered voters.
- How did the EC arrive at the 16.2 million figure?
In cleaning the voter’s register, the EC made edits in all but 3 districts. This would suggest that just under 98% of the districts had errors in their voter lists.
- IF fixing the error meant deleting 20,000 ghost voters, then why did some districts gain voters?
The districts with the most glaring discrepancies were the following districts:
The EC’s voter registry is the back bone of the country’s electoral process. Given the fact that there were glaring discrepancies (caught by Concerned Citizens and not by the EC itself), how can we ensure that the citizens of Uganda are actually participating in free and fair elections? The EC has one job: to be “a model institution and centre of excellence in election management”. Our job as Concerned Citizens isn’t to pass judgement, but to ask probing questions based on the facts as presented by the EC’s own data.
We hope the questions we’ve raised spark a conversation on how we, as an informed electorate, can contribute to making sure that our voice, and vote, is fairly counted in national and district level elections. It is every Ugandan’s duty to be informed about the accuracy of the data used to govern them.
