How to register 20 million voters in one week
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
02 May 2010
Have you registered as a voter? If not, what are you waiting for? There are only three days remaining to the deadline. Stop reading now and go register. Don’t wait to complain that there wasn’t enough time.
If I were the Chairman of the Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC), I would flatly object to any requests for an extension of the deadline. As my one of my lecturers used to say: “If you can’t finish the exam in the three hours allocated, then you can’t do it even if you were given the whole week”!
In the same breath, if you haven’t found the time to go and register during the 45 days that were allocated, then you still won’t find it even if we gave you the whole year! Nevertheless, it would be interesting to find out if the 45 days were enough to enlist the targeted 15 million voters countrywide? Let the numbers speak for themselves:
There are about 20,000 polling stations in the whole country. If each of these registered only one person every day, they would capture over 900,000 voters in total. But the centres have been opening from 8am to 9pm daily (including weekends). That is a total of 9 hours per day.
So; if each polling station registered just one person every hour over the 45 days, there would be a total of 8,100,000 (yes; over 8 million!) in the register by the deadline. And that’s not the end of it: my centre had three clerks; so let’s assume the same applies to all other centres.
So; if each clerk registered one person every hour, every day for 45 days, there would be … wait for it … eight times three equals 24 … that is 24 million voters! Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that anyone who won’t have registered by the deadline is simply not interested in voting. Thus there is no need to extend the deadline: if it is extended, I will go back to my polling station and request to be de-registered – as a show of protest!
In case you are wondering, if we extrapolate this rate of registration to the remaining three days, it turns out that the IIEC can easily capture an additional 1.6 million voters.
Now, the registration process takes about five minutes per voter. Suppose each clerk registered one voter every five minutes; how many people would be enlisted in the remaining three days?
Simple: one clerk registers 6 voters in one hour; three clerks get 18 voters; therefore each polling station will get 192 voters per day (9 hours), that is, 486 in three days. So all the 20,000 registration centres can enlist 9.72 million in the remaining three days.
That’s an interesting result: If we are serious about voting, we can all easily register within one week – all 20 million or so qualified Kenyans. And there wouldn’t be any long queues at the polling stations. We don’t need 45 days (a month and a half).
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