Everyone’s still nervous in Kenya.
They’ve seen countless campaign ads, stood in mile-long queues and cast six ballots each. Now they’ve spent hours watching T.V., but they’re still days away from an answer: Who won the election? Will there even be a winner at all?
The government set up a new provisional vote reporting system, so that each polling station could send a preliminary count to the headquarters via text message in order to have a quicker provisional ballot. All yesterday, the day after the election, we watched these numbers trickle in as the T.V. stations slowly received more tallies.
But the numbers didn’t compute.
After every opinion poll showed an effective tie between candidates Raila and Uhuru in the low-40s percent range, everyone questioned how it was possible that Uhuru was winning with 55 percent of the vote. And no one could explain the staggering numbers of “rejected” votes: over six percent of cast votes had been invalidated.
I got assigned to monitor Twitter for our group of observers. I read a lot of angry – and sometimes witty – tweets about the expensive but ineffective and slow biometric voter identification technology added for this election, as well as the issue with rejected votes. For example, the colors on the separate ballot boxes were indistinct, and in a country with high illiteracy, many votes were likely invalidated because they were placed in the incorrect box.
There were also plenty of tweets that were excited about democracy and about the peacefulness of the elections – so far. The hashtags #tweetlikeaforeignjournalist, #someonetellcnn and #picturesforstuart were trending as Kenyans responded to numerous foreign journalists’ apparent overstatement of the violence so far. Many Kenyan citizens resent the foreign media for looking for violence or attempting to sensationalize any election issues.
Even better were the live tweets from standing in line, though they highlight a serious problem from Election Day. Some young voters spent 12 hours in line while tweeting constantly.
Last night, March 5, the government announced it would give up on the provisional SMS counting and instead only report the official tallies. The official count will be slower though, because each election official must travel to the capital to personally deliver tallies.
The country grows impatient now that it may be Friday or Monday before a verdict is released. But the delay is a good decision since it gives a better chance for legitimate results to be publicized. Especially in a volatile time – there have been scattered protests and a few explosions at polling sites – the country’s citizens need to hear the truth instead of being misled and driven to more frustration and violence.
