When a KIEMS Kit Fails on Polling Day, the Law Has an Answer

Kits fail. Batteries run down, networks drop, screens crack and fingerprints refuse to read. A device that behaved perfectly in a training hall in a town behaves differently in a ward with thin coverage after nine hours in the sun.

None of that stops a Kenyan election, because the law anticipates it.

What the law requires

The Elections Act 2011 requires the commission to put in place a complementary mechanism for the identification of voters. The technology is the primary method. It is not the only permitted method, and a failure of the device is not a legal reason to turn a registered voter away.

That is the whole principle, and everything below it is procedure.

The order of remedies at the station

The sequence a presiding officer works through, in escalating order.

Retry the biometric read. Wet, dusty or worn fingers are the commonest cause, and a second attempt often succeeds.

Search by identity document number. The kit holds the register for the stream, so a failed fingerprint is not a failed lookup.

Use the alphanumeric search on the voter's details.

Replace the device, if it is the device that has failed rather than the read. How quickly that happens depends entirely on how far the nearest replacement is from your station, and that is a question only your returning officer can answer for your area. Ask it before polling day rather than on it.

Apply the complementary mechanism, where identification still cannot be completed by the kit. The presiding officer records what was done and why, voter by voter, in the polling station diary.

Every step is a written record. That is the point of the sequence as much as the identification is. Related: what the presiding officer is responsible for.

If the kit cannot transmit

This is the failure people confuse with a stolen election, and it is worth separating carefully.

Transmission is a speed and verification measure. It sends the figures and an image of the form so that results appear publicly on the night and so that the constituency and national centres can check what they later receive on paper.

The physical form is the record. It is completed at the station, signed by the presiding officer, signed by the agents present, copied into their hands, and then physically delivered with the sealed boxes to the constituency tallying centre. Related: how the forms travel upward.

A stream that could not transmit still produced a counted, announced, signed result witnessed by agents who left with copies of it. The delay is real. The absence of a result is not.

Why a failed kit is not a failed election, and when it becomes one

A single failure handled by procedure, recorded, and reconciled at the tally is an administrative event.

A failure becomes a problem when the procedure is skipped: when there is no record of who was identified by the complementary mechanism, when the reconciliation of ballot papers issued does not add up, or when the number of voters identified at a stream cannot be squared with the number of votes in the box.

That is why the diary entries matter. They are the difference between an explained irregularity and an unexplained one, and unexplained irregularity is what wins petitions.

What your agent must write down

Give every agent a single sheet with four lines on it.

The time the failure started and the time it ended.

The station and the stream, named exactly as they appear on the form.

What the presiding officer did, in the order they did it, and whether it was entered in the polling station diary.

How many voters were identified by the complementary mechanism at that stream, taken from the presiding officer's own record rather than from a guess.

Then the agent stays. A stream an agent walked away from in frustration is a stream nobody from your campaign can speak about afterwards. Related: keeping your agents in place and safe.

What to do about this in 2026

Ask your constituency office two questions in writing, well before the election period gets busy: what the replacement arrangements are for failed kits in your constituency, and what the complementary mechanism will consist of at your stations.

Then train your agents on the answers, in 2026, while there is time to train anybody on anything. On 10 August 2027 the only thing that will be available is what you built beforehand. Related: how the officers themselves are trained.