Finding a voter registration centre in Kenya is now just a click away
Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) reports that over 8.3 million citizens who are eligible to vote in the upcoming elections have still not yet registered.
The slow registrations do not appear to be a sign of disinterest. The National Registration Bureau reports a spike in the number of Kenyans applying for new identity cards, with over 350,000 new ID applications received since the IEBC launched its mass voter registration campaign on February 15.
Pundits believe the slow registrations may be caused by confusion about the registration process.
The nation’s leading civic technology lab, Code for Kenya, has therefore developed a simple web-based tool, GotToVote!, to help voters find their nearest registration centre. The platform gives users an overview of the voter registration process, tells them what documents they need to carry with them when they go to register, and then suggests the closest registration center in users’ wards.
“Every vote counts. But without a voter’s card, you cannot exercise your right to vote. These simple and cheap #GotToVote tools make it easier for eligible Kenyan citizens to register with the IEBC,” says Mulle Musau, the national and regional co-ordinator of the Elections Observation Group (ELOG).
The current version of #GotToVote is the tool’s second deployment in Kenya. The original toolkit was developed by Code for Kenya in 2013 after the official list of locations of registration centers was published as an unwieldy PDF document that most Kenyans could not afford to download. The tool, built by David Lemayian in less than 2 days, helped make the information more accessible and was so successful that it has since been replicated in Malawi (where electoral authorities adopted it as the official government solution for voter verification), in Ghana (where it helped electoral authorities create the country’s first ever consolidated voters roll), and by civil society coalitions in Zambia and Zimbabwe.
GotToVote Kenya currently just helps voters find their registration centers. New modules on the tool, set to launch after voter registration closes, will help voters check that their information has been correctly recorded (to help prevent gerrymandering), and will allow users to send ‘Peace SMSes’ to politicians and their followers to warn against election violence. The tool will also help voters understand their local election results after the polls close.
Code for Kenya is a non-profit civic technology lab and data journalism initiative that uses digital tools to help give ordinary citizens ‘actional information’ and a stronger voice around issues of public interest. We do this by liberating important data, building tools, or supporting progressive pioneers in community organisations, civil society, the media, and government. Successful tools have included our DodgyDr lookup service that helps citizens check that their doctors are not quacks.
Code for Kenya is a founding member of the continental Code for Africa federation of civic technology and data journalism labs, incubated by the International Center for Journalists, with affiliate civic tech labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania & Uganda.
For more information contact Catherine Gicheru on mobile +254.722.767.196 or email cgicheru@codeforkenya.org
