Who BallotWinners Is For, and What It Refuses to Do
A Kenyan campaign is a records problem before it is a message problem.
The speeches get written. The posters get printed. What breaks, cycle after cycle, is the list: who volunteered, which ward they live in, whether anybody ever called them back, and which polling streams still have nobody sitting in them on the morning of 10 August 2027.
BallotWinners is software for that list.
Who it is actually built for
Four kinds of people, and they see four different things.
A candidate running for any of the six seats — President, Governor, Senator, County Woman Representative, Member of the National Assembly or Member of the County Assembly — gets one place holding their volunteers, their ward coordinators, their polling agents, their events and their result forms. One record per person, rather than one per WhatsApp group.
A party administrator gets that same view across every candidate carrying the party's ticket. A governor's campaign and an MCA campaign in the same ward stop recruiting the same three people twice, and stop finding out about it in July.
A polling agent gets a phone screen. It names the station they are assigned to and lets them send in the form they watched being signed.
A voter, a journalist or a researcher gets none of that and needs none of it. They need to look something up: who holds a seat, which ward a polling station sits in, what a result form recorded. Those pages are public and need no account, which is the point. A figure nobody outside the campaign can check is not evidence of anything.
What it refuses to do
It does not publish a number without showing you where the number came from.
Where per-station figures have not yet been extracted from the archived forms, the page says so rather than rendering an empty column a reader would sensibly read as a zero. A blank that looks like data is worse than an admitted gap.
It is not a broadcast machine. There is no button that turns a list of names into a bulk blast to strangers. Kenyan campaigns already have that, it already annoys people, and it is not the part that is broken.
It does not declare results. The IEBC does that. Every figure a campaign records here is a parallel record, useful for spotting a discrepancy and useless as a substitute for the official declaration, and the platform says so on the page rather than in a footnote.
Why a platform rather than a notebook
Because the notebook cannot answer the questions that decide the race.
Ask a campaign how many wards have a named coordinator with a working phone number. Ask which polling streams have a confirmed agent. Ask which of the people who signed up in the first month have been given anything to do since. A notebook holds all of that and can answer none of it, because answering means counting across pages three different people are carrying.
That is not a criticism of notebooks. It is arithmetic. Kenya has 47 counties, 290 constituencies and 1,450 wards. A governor's campaign is a county-wide operation across dozens of wards. A presidential campaign is all of them. The moment the operation is bigger than one person's memory, the memory is the constraint.
Related: why one platform rather than six.
What the six-ballot structure changes
The six seats are not six separate campaigns to the people doing the work.
A volunteer knocking a door is knocking it for whoever that household supports on all six papers. An agent in a polling stream watches six counts, not one. A ward coordinator's weekly numbers are the same numbers whether the candidate at the top of their list is running for MCA or for President.
So the platform is organised around the ward and the station rather than around the candidate. Candidates attach to that structure. The structure does not get rebuilt six times.
Where to start
Start with the public pages, before you create anything at all.
Look up your own ward in the geography explorer and see how far down it goes: county, constituency, ward, polling centre, polling station. Look up whoever currently holds the seat you are interested in. If the data for your area is thin or wrong, that is worth discovering on a quiet Tuesday in 2026 rather than in the last month before nominations.
Then, if you are running or organising, follow the setup order and do it in that order. Most campaigns begin by adding volunteers. That is the step that should come last.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an account to use BallotWinners?
Not for the public pages. The elected officials index, the geography explorer and the archived result forms are all reachable without signing in. You need an account to run a campaign, manage volunteers, deploy agents or submit results, because those actions write records that have to be attributable to a person.
Is BallotWinners an official IEBC system?
No. It is independent software. The IEBC runs the register, the polling, the tallying and the declaration, and its declaration is the official result. What a campaign records on this platform is a parallel record kept for its own purposes, which is exactly what political parties and candidates have always been entitled to keep.
Can a small ward campaign use it, or is it only for national races?
A ward campaign is the case it is designed around. An MCA race is decided in a handful of polling centres by a small team working from cheap Android phones, and the platform runs in a phone browser with nothing to install. The national races use the same structure at a larger scale rather than a different product.