What a Kenyan By-Election Costs, and Who Pays for It

A by-election looks like a small thing. One seat, one constituency, one day.

Operationally it is a general election with a smaller footprint and none of the economies of scale.

What the IEBC has to do for one seat

All of it.

Gazette the vacancy and the timetable. Nomination dates, campaign period, polling day.

Run nominations. Receive papers, verify candidates, resolve disputes.

Print ballot papers. A secure print run for one constituency, which costs disproportionately more per paper than a national run.

Deploy technology. KIEMS kits for every polling stream in the constituency, configured, tested and transported.

Recruit and train officials. Presiding officers, deputies and clerks for every stream, plus training.

Deploy security, in coordination with the police.

Run the count and declaration, and handle any petition afterwards.

Every one of those has a fixed-cost component that does not shrink because there is only one seat.

Who pays

The public, through the IEBC's budget — the same budget that has been approved at around Sh74 billion for the 2027 cycle and that the commission has told Parliament is under pressure, including for diaspora voter education and registration.

Money spent on by-elections is money not spent on preparing for the general election.

Why the seat was vacant matters

Three main causes, with different implications.

Death. Nobody's fault. The cost is unavoidable.

Resignation or appointment. A member leaves for another office. Arguably a cost the political system chose.

A successful election petition. A court finds the original election was not conducted in accordance with the law. Here the cost is a direct consequence of somebody's conduct — and Kenya has no mechanism that makes that somebody bear it.

That third category is worth sitting with. An election annulled for irregularities produces a by-election paid for by taxpayers, and the person or institution responsible faces no financial consequence at all.

The argument this should produce

Not that petitions should be discouraged. Petitions are how an unlawful election gets corrected, and Kenya's courts have used them to do exactly that, up to and including a presidential election.

The argument is about cost recovery where a court finds serious misconduct, and about the far cheaper alternative: conducting the original election properly.

And the practical point for campaigns

Most annulments turn on the same things: results forms that do not reconcile, missing or altered documentation, and processes that cannot be demonstrated after the fact.

A campaign that has photographed the signed form at every polling stream, with the agent and the time recorded, is in a materially stronger position in a petition — and, more importantly, is much better placed to know whether it actually won.

That is the whole reason we built the results feature the way we did: your figure, from your agents, traceable to the form it came from, with the streams nobody covered shown rather than hidden.

The cheaper alternative

Conducting the original election properly, which mostly means documentation.

Kenyan election annulments turn overwhelmingly on the same failures: result forms that do not reconcile between levels, missing or altered documentation, and processes that cannot be demonstrated after the fact.

None of those are exotic. All of them are records problems, and records problems are cheaper to prevent than to litigate.

For the commission that means custody chains and form handling. For a campaign it means the same discipline in miniature: a photographed, signed form from every polling stream, identified to the stream, captured before the paper moves.

A campaign with that has an independent account of the result. One without it is relying entirely on somebody else's paperwork being correct.

Related: the results chain.