The Elected Officials Index: Who Holds the Seat, and What They Won It With

Most arguments about a seat end the moment somebody produces the record.

The elected officials index is that record. It lists the people holding elective office, the seat each one holds, the region that seat covers, and the vote figure recorded against them when the result was declared. It is public. You do not need an account, and you do not need to know a name to start.

Starting from a place rather than a name

Nobody remembers their MCA's name. Everybody knows their ward.

So the index filters by place first. Choose a county and you get its Governor, its Senator and its County Woman Representative, plus the MPs of the constituencies inside it and the MCAs of the wards inside those. Narrow to a constituency and the list narrows with it. Narrow to a ward and you are down to one MCA.

You can also filter by the seat itself when the question runs the other way: every Governor, or every Senator, side by side.

Why the filtered view is a link you can send

Every filter you set is written into the address bar.

That sounds like a technical detail and is actually the whole feature. The thing people want to do with a list like this is send it to somebody. "Look at the Kisumu MCAs" has to survive being pasted into WhatsApp and opened on a different phone, and it only survives if the filter is in the URL rather than in the browser's memory.

It also means the back button behaves, a refresh lands you where you were, and a bookmark still works next year.

The figure beside the name

Everybody knows who won. Far fewer people know how comfortably.

The margin is the most useful fact in Kenyan constituency politics and the one almost nobody carries in their head. A seat won narrowly and a seat won comfortably are different problems for a challenger, different problems for the incumbent, and completely different problems for a party deciding where to spend. Reading a county's list with the figures visible tells you which of its seats are genuinely contested and which are being contested only in conversation.

Every figure shown is one that was published in a declared result. Where a figure was never published in a form we can point to, the index does not invent one. That is covered in where the data comes from.

Why the list never shows you the same person twice

A directory this size is paged, and paging is where directories quietly go wrong.

Kenya has 1,450 wards, so an MCA listing runs to thousands of rows, many of them sharing a position and sharing a vote count. If the page order is decided only by those two things, the database is free to break ties differently each time it is asked. The visible symptom is a leader who appears on two pages while another never appears at all.

The index orders by a value that is unique to each record as well, so scrolling through is a true partition of the list. Rows load as you scroll rather than in numbered pages, which keeps a long scroll cheap on a phone.

What the index does not tell you

It tells you who holds the seat. It does not tell you what they have done with it.

Attendance, committee work, how somebody voted on a bill, what they said in a debate: none of that is in a results record, because a results record is a count of votes and nothing else. Those are separate questions with separate sources, and the archive covers one of them in how to find out how your MP voted. Treating a winning margin as a performance review is a mistake a lot of campaign literature makes.

It also reflects results as declared. Where a seat has changed hands through a by-election or a court ruling, the index follows the published outcome, and a by-election is held within 90 days of a seat falling vacant.

Use it before you plan anything

Three things to do with it this week, if you are organising for 2027.

Look up your own ward, constituency and county and read the six names. Most people cannot name all six, and a campaign volunteer who cannot is going to be embarrassed at a door.

Then read the figures across a whole county and mark the seats that were close. That is your real target list, and it is usually shorter and different from the one people assume.

Then check your own area's entries carefully. If something looks wrong, say so. The index is only as good as the records behind it, and a correction from somebody who lives there is worth more than another pass over the same file.