59,352 KIEMS Kits and a Sh7 Billion Tender: IEBC's 2027 Technology Plan

In August 2026 the IEBC advertised two international tenders that will largely determine how the 2027 election is run.

The first covers the Integrated Elections Management System, its hardware and accessories — in practice the KIEMS kits. The second covers ballot papers, tactile ballot folders, the Register of Voters and the statutory result forms.

Reported values have been in the region of Sh7 billion, with MPs separately told of an additional Sh9.3 billion for new kits that would push the election technology budget past Sh10 billion. Parliament approved an overall election budget of about Sh74 billion in May 2026.

What a KIEMS kit actually does

Three jobs, and it is worth separating them because they fail differently.

Biometric voter registration. Capturing fingerprints and details when somebody registers.

Voter identification on polling day. Confirming that the person in front of the clerk is the registered voter, biometrically or by an alphanumeric search of the register.

Results transmission. Scanning the signed result form at the station and transmitting it to a central server for storage and publication on a public portal.

That third function is the one Kenyan elections argue about, and it is worth understanding that the kit transmits an image of a form a human signed. The form is the record. The transmission is a copy of it moving faster than a car can.

The arithmetic of the kit numbers

IEBC told MPs it needs 59,352 kits: 55,393 for polling stations and 3,959 for training.

It plans a total replacement of the 45,353 kits purchased in 2017, and to reuse the 14,000 purchased in 2022.

Two things fall out of that for campaigns.

There are roughly 55,000 polling stations. That is the scale of the country you are trying to cover with agents. A party claiming to contest everywhere is claiming to staff most of those buildings.

A ten-year-old kit is being retired for a reason. Batteries degrade, fingerprint sensors wear, and the 2022 election saw KIEMS identification failures fall back to manual register searches in some stations. Newer hardware is a real improvement and a real cost.

The questions being asked about the money

Kenyan reporting through 2026 raised queries about the Sh6.5 billion election technology tender and about the overall cost of the kits, describing 2027 as on course to be the most expensive election in the country's history.

Separately, a bill on who controls the election technology and servers has been reported as languishing while 2027 approaches. That is not a small unresolved question. In 2017 the custody and integrity of the results transmission system was the centre of a successful presidential petition.

What a campaign should take from this

Not much that is comforting, and one thing that is actionable.

Do not build your results plan around the IEBC portal. The public portal is useful and it is not yours. It publishes when it publishes. If the transmission has a bad night — and Kenyan elections have had bad nights — a campaign whose only source is the portal has no independent view at all.

Build your own tally from your own agents. Every one of those 55,000 stations has a signed form at the end of the night. Your agent can photograph it. If you have that photograph, keyed to the stream, you have a number you can defend, and you have it whether or not the transmission works.

That is the entire design principle behind BallotWinners' results feature: your agents' forms, added up at stream, ward, constituency, county and national level, with every figure tracing back to the agent and the form it came from. It is not a replacement for the IEBC's process. It is the independent record that makes the official one checkable.

Related: how a presidential result is declared.