NO SUCH THING AS VOTERS CARD

When one presents themselves for registration as a voter at any registration centre, they are issued with what is called a ‘registration acknowledgement slip’. This acknowledgement slip is not a voters card and is of little significance; hence the reason the IEBC does not even bother to laminate it (at least mine was not laminated when I registered).

Furthermore, one is not required to produce or present the slip during voting. At the polling stations, one is required to present their original identification document that they presented during the registration process. This can be the national identification card or passport.

It therefore does not matter whether you lose or keep your acknowledgment slip because nobody will require you to produce it anywhere or at a later date.

GANGS HARASSING CIVILIANS FOR VOTERS CARDS

That said, there have been reports of a gang of youths harassing people to produce their voters’ card(s) in the lakeside county of Homa Bay. I refer to them as a ‘gang’ because whatever they are doing is illegal and a criminal offense. This gang is reported to be stopping mostly bodaboda operators within the town and harassing them to produce their voters’ cards. Those found without the purported document are warned to go and register failure to which they should not operate within the town in an illegal operation dubbed “No voters card, no job”.

This act is as defeatist as it is ill-advised. For starters, even though the constitution accords every citizen the right to register as a voter, it does not provide for forceful registration in the exercising of that right. In other words, it is not mandatory to register or to vote. It is not a criminal offense. Otherwise there would have been a body mandated to police the voter registration process and bring to book citizens who fail to register.

Secondly, the IEBC itself does not require one to produce a voter’s card at the polling stations in order to vote. It therefore defies all logic for an ordinary citizen or a group of people to purport to ask one to produce a non-existent document in the name of a voter’s card or even to force one to go and register as a voter.

Thirdly, the fact that you force one to go and register does not imply that they will wake up on the material day to go and vote in the first place. Or yet still, it is no guarantee that they will vote for the candidate for whom you force them to register. Gangs like these ignorantly assume that people who have not registered as voters automatically belong to their candidate of choice. What they fail to realise is that they may be arming the voters of their opponents. Even politicians know that it is counterproductive to force people to register. 

It is therefore a display of ignorance of the highest order and an illegality for anyone to purport to act as self-appointed voter registration police. It is a crime that should be punished. Kenya is not a banana republic where criminal gangs harass innocent civilians after all.