Impersonation and Multiple Voting: The Offences a Voter Can Commit
Most election offences in Kenya require a role. You need to be a candidate, an official, a party officer or somebody with money to commit them.
A short list can be committed by an ordinary person holding an ID card in a queue, and they carry real criminal weight.
Voting in another person's name
Impersonation is applying for a ballot paper as somebody else: a living person who has not yet voted, a person who has already voted, or a person who has died and whose name has not left the register.
The offence is complete at the point of application. You do not have to receive the ballot, and you certainly do not have to mark it. Asking for a ballot in a name that is not yours is the act.
The same applies to a person who assists someone to do it. A campaign worker who supplies the ID, the name and the station has committed an offence alongside whoever stood in the queue.
Voting more than once
Voting twice in the same election is an offence. So is being registered more than once, which is where the conduct usually starts.
Registration offences run ahead of voting offences by months or years, and they are the easier of the two for the system to detect after the fact. Registering in two places, registering while not entitled to, giving false particulars on a registration form, or registering in a station you have no connection to are each separately caught by the Election Offences Act 2016.
A person who registered twice and then voted twice has committed at least two offences at two different points in time, and the register itself is the evidence for the first one.
What KIEMS actually changes
The Kenya Integrated Elections Management System handles biometric voter identification, and it narrows the space for impersonation considerably. A fingerprint that does not match the record on the kit is a stop, not a debate.
It does not close the space entirely, for one procedural reason that every agent should understand. Biometric identification fails for ordinary reasons: worn fingerprints, manual labour, age, injury, a poor original capture. The law therefore provides an alternative identification procedure, and that procedure is where the risk sits.
An agent's job at that moment is not to object to the alternative procedure, which is lawful and necessary. It is to note that it was used, for whom, and how often. A station where the biometric route fails repeatedly for the same category of voter is a station worth writing down.
Related: what the day actually looks like, hour by hour.
Offences involving the ballot paper itself
Once a ballot is in a voter's hand, several further offences become available.
Taking it out of the polling station. Defacing or destroying it. Putting anything into a ballot box other than the ballot paper you were issued. Forging or attempting to forge a ballot paper or its serial marks.
The secrecy of the vote is also protected by law, which is why photographing a marked ballot is a problem rather than a joke. A photograph proves how you voted, and a proof of how you voted is exactly what a person paying for votes needs in order to make the payment conditional. Ballot secrecy is not a courtesy to the shy voter. It is the mechanism that makes vote buying unenforceable, and every photograph weakens it.
What an agent should do on suspicion
Not confront the voter. Ever.
Record the time, the stream, the queue position and what specifically you observed. Raise it with the presiding officer, who is the person with the authority to act, and write down the response you got and the time you got it. If a person is permitted to vote over your objection, that is not the end of anything: the note you made is what a petition or a complaint is later built from.
An agent who argues loudly at the desk gets removed, and a removed agent observes nothing for the rest of the day. The quiet, timed, specific note is worth more than the argument, every time.
The other half of this subject is the conduct of the people running the station: the offences only an official can commit.
Before 2027
Check your own registration details, in good time, in the place you actually intend to vote. A large number of the problems that present as suspected impersonation on polling day turn out to be registration confusion, and the difference between the two is discovered at the desk, in front of a queue, when nothing can be fixed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is voter impersonation under Kenyan law?
It is applying for a ballot paper in a name that is not yours, whether that name belongs to a living person, to someone who has already voted, or to a person who has died and remains on the register. The offence is complete when the application is made, so you do not need to receive or mark the ballot. Anyone who helped arrange it commits an offence too.
Does KIEMS stop multiple voting in Kenya?
It narrows it substantially, because biometric identification stops a mismatch at the desk. It does not close the gap entirely, since biometric reads fail for ordinary reasons such as worn fingerprints or a poor original capture, and the law provides an alternative identification procedure for those cases. Agents should record when that procedure is used rather than object to it.
Is it an offence to photograph your ballot paper in Kenya?
The secrecy of the vote is protected by law, and a photograph of a marked ballot cuts directly against it. The practical reason matters as much as the legal one: a proof of how you voted is exactly what somebody paying for votes needs to make the payment conditional, so ballot secrecy is the mechanism that makes vote buying unenforceable.