How to Handle a Polling Day Incident Without Losing the Rest of the Day
An incident is anything that stops one of your people doing their job.
A refused agent at a door. A confiscated phone. An argument that becomes a shove. A vehicle blocked. A count suspended. A crowd outside a station that should not be there.
Some of these are serious and some are not, and on the day you will not always be able to tell which is which within the first minute. What decides how much a campaign is damaged is rarely the incident itself. It is how many of your people stopped working because of it.
The first three minutes
Three things happen, in this order, and they are all done by the person on the spot.
Get away from the danger. No document, no stream and no argument is worth an injury. An agent who withdraws and reports is doing exactly what you want.
Report up one level. Agent to ward coordinator, coordinator to day commander. Short and factual: where, what, who, whether anyone is hurt, whether the stream is still covered.
Write it down. Time, place, what happened, who was present. Ninety seconds of notes made at the scene are worth more than an hour of recollection a week later.
What does not happen in the first three minutes is a post, a broadcast, a call to a journalist, or a message into a group of two hundred people.
Who owns it, and who carries on
One named person owns the incident. On most campaigns that is the legal and compliance point, and it must not be the candidate.
Everybody else continues with the day they were given. This is the whole discipline, and it is harder than it sounds because an incident is the most interesting thing happening and everyone wants to follow it.
A campaign where forty people are watching one incident has stopped campaigning in thirty-nine wards. Say that at the briefing, in those words.
Related: the command structure this depends on.
Recording it so it is still useful in six weeks
An incident that matters legally will be examined long after the day, by people who were not there and who have only your record to work from.
Capture five things while it is fresh. Time, to the minute. Exact location, station and stream, not just the ward. What happened, in plain sequence, without adjectives. Who was present, with names where you have them and descriptions where you do not. Whether anything was reported, to whom, and what they said.
Photographs and video where it is safe to take them, from two people rather than one, because a single clip is easier to dismiss than two accounts that agree.
Keep it factual. A note that says an officer refused entry at a stated time is evidence. A note that says an officer was hostile and biased is an opinion, and it weakens the paragraph it sits in.
Who to tell, and in what order
Inside a polling station, the presiding officer is the authority. Most disputes are raised with them first, and many are settled there.
Above that, the constituency or county returning officer handles what a presiding officer cannot. Where an offence may have been committed, the police. Where police conduct is itself the issue, the oversight body for police conduct. Observers and election monitoring groups keep their own records, and a report made to them adds an independent trace of the same event.
Reporting to more than one is not duplication. Each keeps a separate record, and a pattern is assembled from records rather than from impressions.
Related: preparing agents for the risks before the day.
Keeping one incident from eating the whole day
Four rules, agreed in advance and written on the same card as your command structure.
Cover the gap first. Before anybody discusses the incident, the stream involved gets a replacement agent. That is a coordinator's job and it happens in parallel.
One channel. The incident owner talks to the people involved. Nobody else calls them, because six calls to a shaken agent produce six versions of the story.
No public comment until the facts are in. A campaign that puts out a version at midday and corrects it at four has damaged itself twice.
A scheduled update. The owner tells the day commander at agreed times. Without that, everybody keeps asking, and the asking is what consumes the day.
Write the incident card in 2026
One card, in every agent's pocket: what to do first, who to call, the five things to record, and the single line that they must never risk their safety for a document or a stream.
Then walk your coordinators through two scenarios at your final briefing, out loud, before 10 August 2027. People perform a plan they have rehearsed once. They do not perform a plan they have only been sent.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a polling agent do first when something goes wrong?
Move away from any danger, report one level up to their ward coordinator, and write down the time, place and sequence while it is fresh. No document and no stream is worth an injury, and an agent who withdraws and reports has done the right thing. Public comment, posts and calls to journalists come much later, if at all.
Who should a campaign report a polling day incident to in Kenya?
Inside the station, the presiding officer is the authority and most disputes are raised there first. Beyond that, the returning officer for the constituency or county, the police where an offence may have been committed, the police oversight body where police conduct is the issue, and election observers who keep their own independent records. Reporting to more than one is not duplication.
How do you stop one incident from ruining a campaign's polling day?
Give it one named owner, cover the affected stream immediately with a replacement agent, and require everybody else to carry on with their assigned work. Set scheduled updates so people are not constantly asking, and make no public comment until the facts are established.