31 Days are more than enough to register 3.5 million voters
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
20 August 2006
The annual voter registration exercise started this
week and it will run for 31 days, from August 15 to September 14 (both
days included). There are an estimated five million individuals over 18
years of age who are not in the electors’ roll. Of these, 3.5 million
have the documents necessary for registration (either national ID card
or Passport).
20,000 registration centres have been opened
countrywide to facilitate the exercise. The Electoral Commission expects
to enlist at most 800,000 new voters during this period. But gauging
from previous years when only about half a million people turn up to
register, this year’s target might not be met. That would be a shame;
why, even the 800,000 target itself is too low!
800,000 people expected to register at 20,000 centres
means that on average, each registration station will receive about 40
people only during the entire period. Since the exercise is going on for
31 days, it turns out that each centre can expect to enlist only one or
two new voters every day! That’s right – 40 divided by 31 is about 1.3.
Now let’s turn the numbers around a little bit.
Suppose that only one person visited each station every hour. That works
out to 20,000 new registrations per hour countrywide. Since the offices
are open for eight hours daily (from
Let us now extrapolate this: If the process continued
with one voter registered per hour per station, how long would it take
to enlist all the 3.5 million eligible and qualified individuals? The
answer is simple: 3.5 million divided by 160,000 per day, equals 22
days.
But there is an argument that most people cannot make
it to the registration centres on weekdays and therefore, there isn’t
enough time for everyone to register. Is that valid? Well, suppose all
the 3.5 million eligible and qualified individuals can only find time on
Saturday or Sunday. There are four weekends during the registration
period. That is eight free days.
437,500 (3.5 million divided by eight) would have to
be registered each day countrywide if the exercise was only done on
weekends. 437,500 sounds like a very large number…until you bear in mind
that there are 20,000 centres. Working on Saturday and Sunday only, each
centre would have to enlist only about 22 people per day!
Now suppose the registration clerk spend 20 minutes
with each voter. How many would be registered in a day? Well, eight
working hours are equal to 480 minutes. Therefore, the clerk would
enlist 24 people in a day. That’s more than enough to net in the 3.5
million prospects. But is 20 minutes enough? Yes; it took me about ten
minutes to register a few years ago.
The moral of the story? Don’t complain that the time
is not enough – if you are not registered, take your calendar, pick a
date and commit to visit a registration centre. Go ahead; prove that it
takes more than a sticker on a car to demonstrate that you are proud to
be Kenyan
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