What to Think About When Thinking About 17 October

1. The very issue outlined on Facebook on Friday (about what the Supreme Court meant by 'fresh election') is about to become the subject of a court case. Does a 'fresh election' mean the whole kit and caboodle, starting with voter registration? On what basis would the IEBC decide to restrict the vote to only two candidates, and on what basis were the candidates selected? There's confusion as to how binding the 2013 decision was, and we still don't have the full judgement from Friday's decision (and may not have it until September 22, three and a half weeks before the scheduled election).

2. Is there a case for someone who turned 18 and got an ID card between the close of the last voter registration period and the Presidential election in October to sue for being disenfranchised? It will be more than half a year since the last voting registration exercise was completed. That's probably more than half a million potential disenfranchised voters, given our (roughly estimated) population growth rate.

3. I hope we are seeing the benefits of separating Presidential and other elections (as stated here as a wish many moons ago). While accidental, this has many benefits

          i) It's a neater, faster way of doing things.
         ii) We'll see a massively reduced number of spoilt votes in the Presidential election. Many of                    these, in 2013 and in August, were a result of people putting Presidential ballots in the
             wrong boxes.
I hope when we finally review the Constitution, we can have Presidential and down-ballot elections on different dates, even in different years.

4. With (3) in mind, expect a radical shift in some voting patterns. As Mohamed Wehliye said a few days ago, some communities (especially pastoral ones in the North) only muster up electoral enthusiasm for County and Parliamentary votes. Without these, turnout could be drastically lower, affecting the chances of some candidates.

5. The choice of Tuesday in our Constitution for voting is a copy of the American one, whose reasoning expired a century and a half ago. Elections were on Tuesday because most people needed a full day of travel to and from voting places, and they didn't want to do it on Sunday for religious reasons. Wednesdays were market days, so Tuesday was a good compromise. We didn't have such issues, so I'm not sure why this remains in our Constitution.

5 b) In practical terms, having an election on a Tuesday leads to the loss of half a week. Many people will claim the Monday off for whatever reason. Our elections are so elaborate that they take the whole day to conduct, thus meaning that the day has to be declared a public holiday. The simple solution would be to move the election to Saturday or Sunday (and also effect the Constitutional change in (3), and solve that issue.