What Happens to Your Campaign Data After 10 August 2027
The morning after the vote, everything your campaign collected becomes one of two things. An asset you will use for years, or a liability sitting on fourteen phones belonging to people who no longer work for you.
Which one it becomes is decided long before polling day, by whether anybody ever wrote down what happens to it afterwards.
What you actually own the morning after
Three separate collections, with three different futures.
Your supporter records. Names, numbers, polling stations, and what each person said. This is personal data belonging to other people that you are holding, and it is the part with legal weight.
Your own record of the count. Whatever your agents recorded, stream by stream, and copies of the result forms they were given. Kenya's results are built from the polling station forms upward, and your parallel record of them is evidence in a way that nothing else you hold is.
Your record of the work. Who canvassed, who coordinated, who turned up. Unglamorous, and the thing every future campaign wishes it had.
The petition window decides what you keep first
Election petitions other than presidential ones are filed within 28 days of the declaration of the result, and a presidential petition goes to the Supreme Court within 7 days of declaration and is determined within 14.
Whatever you might need in that window has to survive the week after the election, which is the week everybody is exhausted, disappointed or celebrating, and the week phones get wiped and coordinators disappear.
So the first retention decision is simple and urgent. Every result form copy, every agent's stream record, every incident note, collected centrally within days rather than weeks. Not because you intend to file anything. Because you cannot decide whether to file anything if the material is scattered.
Related: what your agents were supposed to bring back.
Consent had a purpose, and the purpose ends
People gave you their numbers for a campaign. Kenya has a data protection law and a regulator, and the general principle is that personal data is used for the purpose it was collected for and kept no longer than that purpose requires.
That does not mean you must delete everything on 11 August. It does mean the honest way to keep a supporter list past the election is to tell people you are keeping it and give them a straightforward way to say no.
A winning candidate has an obvious continuing purpose: constituent communication. A losing candidate planning to run again has a real purpose too, but it is a new one, and it deserves to be stated rather than assumed.
Related: how to build the list so this is easy.
What to delete, and who signs it off
Name one person responsible for data before the campaign starts, and give them the authority to run the deletion afterwards. If nobody owns it, nothing happens, and nothing happening is itself the failure.
Sensible defaults, decided in advance:
Keep supporter records where consent covers continuing contact, your result records, and your record of who did the work.
Delete copies. Every exported spreadsheet, every WhatsApp forward, every file on a volunteer's laptop. Copies are where a leak comes from, and they are never the version anybody is using.
Return or destroy anything a party or a coalition partner shared with you for the campaign only.
Write those three lines into your campaign plan in 2026 and the decision exists before anybody is too tired to make it.
The handover problem, and the ninety-day one
Data on a coordinator's personal phone leaves with the coordinator. This is the most common way Kenyan campaigns lose everything they built, and it does not require anybody to behave badly.
A campaign that ran on one shared system hands over in an afternoon. A campaign that ran on fourteen notebooks and a group chat cannot hand over at all, and the candidate who takes over next cycle starts from nothing, again.
Related: where all of this should have been living.
There is also one reason not to relax after the result. A by-election is held within 90 days of a seat falling vacant. Vacancies arise for reasons nobody schedules, and when one arises the campaign that already has station-level records and a live supporter list is contesting a different election from the one that is starting over.
That applies to the winner as much as the loser. Ninety days is not enough time to build any of this.
Do this now, not in August 2027
Write half a page: who owns the data, what is kept, what is deleted, when, and how a supporter asks to be removed.
Half a page, agreed in 2026 while everyone is calm, replaces an argument in the second week of August 2027 that nobody will have the energy to have.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a campaign keep its data after an election?
Long enough to cover the petition window and any continuing purpose you have told supporters about, and no longer than that. Records connected to the count should be gathered centrally within days of the declaration, because petitions are filed on short statutory timelines and scattered material cannot be assessed in time.
Can a losing candidate keep the supporter list for next time?
Running again is a genuine purpose, but it is a different one from the campaign the numbers were given for. The straightforward approach is to tell people you are keeping their details and why, and to give them an easy way to be removed. A list kept openly is also a list people stay on.
Why does campaign data disappear after polling day?
Because most of it was never in one place. It sat on coordinators' phones, in group chats and in notebooks, and it leaves when those people do. Campaigns that ran on a single shared system hand everything over in an afternoon, while campaigns that did not cannot hand over anything at all.