The need to have this law passed is clearly not urgent, that it must come tomorrow.
This is something that can be addressed when we return from recess.
So what is happening here is an amendment that I have christened “the Chepkonga Ballot Stuffing Amendment” (Samuel Chepkonga, MP Ainabkoi, is the Chairman of the Departmental Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs). It is an enabling statute for ballot stuffing, a proposed legal statute that would specifically enable rigging.
Why, given these specific circumstances, do an amendment for the whole country? Yet almost 80 percent of the country has a 3-G network?
The areas that have do not have a 3-G network are known.
And even then, it is not as if there is no other option. These people are just being lazy. They could use satellite phones.
Moreover in this amendment, they have added voter identification. And voter identification does not rely on 3-G networks. It is transmission of data that relies on 3-G networks.
So if the Jubilee people were really being genuine and they wanted to stop ballot stuffing, they would have sought to create an amendment specifically for results transmission in those areas without 3-G networks – and those areas would be gazetted. And a specific provision would be made that in these gazetted areas – there would be a use of satellite phones when it came to transmission of results.
So, essentially, what we have here is a situation in which, with everything having been left open like this, they can collapse the electronic voter identification devices (EVIDs); they can likewise collapse the results transmissions; and then use this law – this proposed amendment – to allow them to physically stuff ballots.
For when the EVIDs work they also tally the voters who have cast their ballots in that polling station. And that is precisely what Jubilee wants to avoid.
So, basically, this is a statute to enable ballot stuffing. And that is why we are determined to resist it.
As I have explained, if the intention was only to apply it to those areas that have no 3-G network, then we might have said that they are trying to be genuine, and there might have been room for discussion and compromise. But now that they are trying to bring a statute that covers the whole country we recognise this manoeuvre for what it is – a preliminary to ballot stuffing.