Six Ballots, One Platform: Why Supporting a Kenyan Candidate Shouldn't Mean Six Websites

Updated 2 October 2026.

On 10 August 2027 a Kenyan voter will be handed six ballot papers.

President. Governor. Senator. County Woman Representative. Member of Parliament. Member of County Assembly.

Six decisions, six papers, one booth, one morning.

Now consider what supporting those six candidates looks like today. Six different Facebook pages. Six "Join Us" forms, if they have websites at all. Six WhatsApp groups you get added to without asking. Six SMS lists that contact you when there is a rally and never otherwise. And no way at all for the MCA candidate to know that the person volunteering for them is the same person volunteering for the governor.

That is not a design choice anyone made. It is what happens when nobody builds the thing.

What we built instead

BallotWinners runs all six ballots on one platform.

For a supporter, that means one account. You can back a presidential candidate, a governor, a senator, a woman representative, an MP and an MCA — the whole ticket, or six candidates from six different parties, which is how a great many Kenyans actually vote. You volunteer once. Your details are entered once.

For a campaign, it means the six candidates on a ticket can share the same volunteers, the same ward coordinators and the same polling agents instead of each recruiting their own version of the same people in the same wards.

Why the six-ballot structure matters operationally

Because the work is genuinely shared and campaigns currently duplicate it.

A polling agent sits in one stream and watches six counts. There is no such thing as a "presidential agent" who is unable to see the MCA result — they are watching all six forms: 34A, 35A, 36A, 37A, 38A and 39A. A ticket that recruits six separate sets of agents is paying six times for one chair.

A ward coordinator who knocks a door is knocking it for six candidates at once. The household has one opinion about the drainage, one about the bursary, one about the market levy. Recording that six times in six different notebooks is not thoroughness, it is waste.

What each seat actually needs

The six races are not the same job, and the platform does not pretend they are.

President. Your national total and your share in each of the 47 counties, added up from the forms your agents send at stream, constituency, county and national level. Every figure opens to show the agent and the form behind it.

Governor. A county is two to seventeen constituencies. Each one scored separately on agents, doors knocked and issues raised, so you can see which constituency is winning votes for you and which is losing them.

Senator. Many voters leave the senate paper blank after voting for president, governor and MP. The rejected-ballot figure is printed on every Form 38A, and reading it station by station tells you where you are losing votes to nothing at all.

Woman Representative. A county-wide ballot on a smaller budget, organised by group rather than by street — a chama, a market, a church group, each with its own captain and its own target.

MP. A coordinator per ward with their own volunteers and targets, field complaints logged with a photo and a location, and every stream showing whether it has an agent yet.

MCA. A ward seat decided by a few hundred votes and by what people think about garbage, water, street lights and school fees. It runs in the phone browser — no app to install — because a ward campaign is run from a cheap Android or it is not run at all.

The part that is not a feature list

The reason to build it this way is that Kenyan campaigns fail at the same point every cycle: they collect names and never use them.

A volunteer signs up in September and hears nothing until a rally announcement in July. A supporter fills a form and receives one SMS. A ward has forty enthusiastic people and no record of what any of them was asked to do.

Six separate half-built systems guarantee that outcome. One place where every supporter, volunteer, agent, shilling and result form lives — for all six seats — is the only version where the follow-up actually happens.

That is the whole idea. Not six websites. One.

Related: proving your agent coverage.