Your Name, Your Symbol, and How You Appear on the Ballot Paper

Most people who vote for you will never meet you. They will meet a name, a photograph and a symbol printed on a folded sheet of paper, in a booth, in under a minute, alongside five other ballots.

That sheet is the last piece of communication your campaign gets, and most of what appears on it is fixed in an office long before polling day.

The name is the one that matches your documents

Your name goes on the ballot in the form the Commission takes from your nomination papers, and those are checked against your identity document and the voter register.

This matters more than it sounds. Many Kenyan politicians are known by a name that is not the full legal one on their identity card. Whether and how a commonly used name can appear is governed by the Commission's rules and its forms, and it is a question to put to your returning officer during the nomination process rather than to discover when a sample ballot is published.

The safe rule is that the three records should agree before you file: identity document, voter register entry, academic certificates where they are required. Related: what the nomination file must contain.

The photograph is a specification, not a portrait

The Commission specifies the photograph, and it will be reproduced small, in print, often on a machine that is not being generous.

Get it taken properly, against a plain background, with your face filling the frame and no sunglasses, hat or busy background. Look at it printed at thumbnail size before you submit it. A photograph that is unrecognisable at the size it will actually be printed has wasted the single most valuable piece of space you get.

Party symbol or your own

A party candidate carries the party's name and symbol. That is one of the things a ticket buys, and in wards where a party brand is dominant it is worth more than anything a candidate can print.

An independent candidate applies for a symbol. It must be approved by the Commission, it must not resemble a party's symbol, and it has to survive being printed small and in one colour.

Choose accordingly. Simple shapes, one clear idea, no text, no fine detail, nothing that depends on colour to be legible. Test it: print it at the size it will appear on the ballot, photocopy that twice, and show it to somebody who has not seen it before. If they cannot say what it is, choose again.

Then put it on everything from the day it is approved. A symbol only works if voters have seen it enough times to find it without reading. Related: the independent route it belongs to.

The position on the paper is not yours

Candidates spend a surprising amount of energy on where they appear in the list. The order of candidates on a Kenyan ballot is determined by the Commission under its rules, not by the candidate, and it is settled after nomination closes.

Which has one practical consequence: do not build a campaign message around a ballot position until the Commission has confirmed it. Posters printed with a number that turns out to be wrong are worse than posters with no number, and they cannot be recalled from a ward.

Once it is confirmed, use it everywhere, because a position is the easiest instruction a voter can carry into a booth.

Six ballots, and what that does to a voter

A Kenyan voter is handed six papers on 10 August 2027: President, Governor, Senator, Woman Representative, MP and MCA. They are different colours and they are filled in the same short visit.

A voter who is certain about one race and vague about the others is deciding the vague ones on recognition. Name, face, symbol, position. That is the entire basis of a large number of down-ballot votes, and it is why the sheet is worth this much attention.

Related: what each paper decides.

What to do about it now

Fix the name question first, because it takes the longest. If your identity document, your voter registration and your certificates disagree, start the corrections this year.

Take the photograph properly and keep the file. Choose and test a symbol if you are going independent, and design your material so the symbol is the dominant element rather than a logo in a corner.

Then teach it. Every canvasser, every poster and every WhatsApp message should carry the same three things in the same order, so that a voter holding six papers finds you without having to read carefully.