How to Keep Your Polling Agents Safe on 10 August 2027

On 10 August 2027 your polling agents will be inside buildings you cannot see, for something like fifteen hours, doing the only job in your campaign that cannot be redone the next day.

Most Kenyan campaigns prepare for this with a pep talk. Here is a plan instead.

Before the day

Name every agent to a specific stream. Not a station — a stream. A busy station has several, each with its own count and its own result form. An agent assigned to "Kaloleni Primary" is an agent who does not know where to stand.

Confirm each one twice. Once when recruited, once in the final week. The drop-out rate between recruitment and polling day is real and it is always higher than campaigns assume.

Brief them on the form, not on loyalty. The agent's job is to observe, to object correctly when something is wrong, to sign or decline to sign, and to capture the result form. That is four concrete things. Teach those.

Give them a one-page sheet. What time to arrive, who to call, what to do if asked to leave, what the result form looks like, and where to send the photograph. One page, in the language they actually use.

Sort out payment in advance. Agent payment on the day, in cash, with no list, is how campaigns lose both money and accountability. Prepare a named list, agree the amount, and reconcile the same night.

The three check-ins

Fix three times and hold to them.

At opening. Confirms the agent is present, the station opened, and the ballot boxes were shown empty.

At close of voting. Confirms the agent is still there. This is the one campaigns skip and it is the one that matters most, because the gap between close and declaration is the risk window.

At declaration. Confirms the result and the form.

Somebody at headquarters must be watching for missing check-ins as they happen. A missing 5pm check-in from three streams in the same ward is information you can act on at 5.15pm and cannot act on at midnight.

The count hour is when it goes wrong

The evidence for this is Kenyan and recent. In the November 2025 by-elections, the attempt on Siakago Hall in Mbeere North came during counting, not during voting. Armed men arrived with clubs while the count was under way.

So plan the day around that hour. Your most experienced agents go to the streams most likely to be contested. Your reserve people are mobile and near those stations, not at headquarters. Your lawyer's phone is on.

Capture the form before anything else

The single most valuable object your campaign produces on polling day is a photograph of the signed result form, identified to its stream.

It is what lets you add up your own total independently. It is what lets you challenge a figure that does not match. And it is the thing that becomes impossible to obtain twenty-four hours later.

A ward MCA race turns on Form 36A. A constituency race on 35A. Senate on 38A, woman representative on 39A, governor on 37A, president on 34A. Every one of them is signed at the stream and every one of them is capturable by a person with a phone.

This is the whole reason BallotWinners exists in the shape it does: agents send the form from the stream, the platform adds the figures up at stream, ward, constituency, county and national level, and every number on screen opens to show the agent and the form it came from. Streams with no agent are listed, not hidden. On the night, that is the difference between knowing and hoping.

And afterwards

Get your agents home. Then reconcile: every stream accounted for, every form captured, every payment made against a name.

The campaign that does this properly has a complete, independent record of the count in its own hands by the following morning. The campaign that does not has a WhatsApp group full of numbers nobody can source.

Related: recruiting agents early and reading Form 38A.