Budget by Polling Station, Not by Rally
Most Kenyan campaign budgets are a list of events. Venue, chairs, public address system, transport, water, T-shirts, the band. Add them up and you have a total.
What you do not have is a plan, because a rally is a cost. It is not a target.
Rebuild the budget as rows, one per polling station
Take the same money and lay it out differently. One row per polling station in your area, and against each row the amount you intend to spend there between now and 10 August 2027.
Some of that spending is obvious and local: canvass materials, volunteer transport, airtime for the coordinator, refreshments for a door-to-door team. Some of it is shared and has to be split across stations, such as posters, a vehicle, or a rally that draws from four stations at once. Split it roughly. Rough is fine. Unallocated is not.
Now sort the sheet by amount and put the register total next to it. The first thing most candidates see is that their largest station is not their largest line, and that a large line exists for a rally in a place they were always going to win.
Cost per vote, computed honestly
Divide planned spending at a station by the votes you expect to win there. That is cost per vote, and it is uncomfortable in a useful way.
Suppose you plan to spend a certain sum at a station holding 900 registered voters where you expect maybe 300 votes, and roughly the same sum at a station holding 2,400 registered voters where you expect 800. The second station is buying you votes at less than half the price. If both lines stay the same next month, that is now a decision you have made rather than an accident.
The figures above are illustrative and deliberately round. The method is what transfers.
The rally still has a job. It is just not this one.
A rally does three things a station budget cannot. It produces coverage. It lifts the morale of people doing unglamorous work. And it gathers a large number of names in one place at one time.
That third one is the only part that converts into votes, and it converts only if somebody writes the names down properly and follows them up. A rally whose names go into a notebook that is never opened again cost you the whole line for nothing.
Related: what to do with the names afterwards.
Budget the rally as a name-collection operation with a media benefit, and budget the follow-up in the same line. If you cannot afford the follow-up, you cannot afford the rally.
What the law does to your budget
Kenya has campaign spending limits, and they are set by IEBC regulation and gazetted before an election, seat by seat. Check the current notice for your seat rather than any figure quoted to you second-hand, including anything you read in a blog post.
Two practical consequences. Your spending has to be recorded as you go, not reconstructed afterwards, because reconstruction is where campaigns produce documents that do not survive scrutiny. And your spending has to run through an account rather than through pockets, so that the record exists at all.
Related: building a budget that survives the audit.
The lines every campaign forgets and every campaign pays
Agent costs on the day. Transport, food and a payment for every agent in every stream. This is a large number, it lands in a single week, and it is the one nobody budgets for in 2026.
Follow-up. Airtime and time to call back the people who gave you their numbers.
Replacement. Volunteers leave, materials get destroyed, a vehicle breaks down in the week you need it most.
The last fortnight. Prices for everything a campaign needs rise sharply when every campaign in the constituency needs it at once. Budget the last two weeks at a higher rate than the rest.
Do this with your treasurer this week
Print the budget. Next to every line, write which polling stations it benefits. Any line that benefits none of them specifically goes in a separate section labelled overheads, and that section should be small.
Then look at your five largest stations and check that they appear in the budget at all. In most campaigns, at least one of them does not.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much can a candidate spend on a campaign in Kenya?
Spending limits are set by IEBC regulation and gazetted before an election, and they differ by seat. Check the current gazette notice for the office you are contesting rather than relying on a figure someone quotes to you. Keep contemporaneous records, because limits are enforced against what your documents show rather than what you remember.
What is cost per vote and how do I calculate it?
Divide the money you plan to spend in a place by the number of votes you realistically expect to win there. Doing this station by station shows which spending is efficient and which is habit. It is a planning tool rather than a precise measurement, and its value is in the comparison between rows, not in the absolute number.
Are rallies a waste of campaign money?
Not if they are budgeted for what they actually deliver. A rally produces coverage, lifts volunteer morale and gathers many names in one place. Only the names convert into votes, and only if the follow-up is resourced in the same budget line. A rally with no follow-up budget is an expense with no mechanism attached.