Editor's Review

Azimio wants the oncoming elections in their entirety to be held using the manual system.

The Azimio La Umoja One Kenya Coalition Party is pushing for the employment of a full manual electoral system in the coming elections.

In the previous polls held since the promulgation of the 2010 Constitution, the electronic system has been used to complement the manual one.

However, with the hybrid management of the elections, there have been concerns of malpractice every electoral cycle.

Azimio now wants the country to fully revert to the manual system at the expense of the electoral system which the opposition claimed has been misused to rig elections.

While voting is done manually, the electronic bit comes in to complement the manual identification of voters as well as transmitting the results to the national tallying centre.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Azimio Parliamentary Group (PG) meeting, former Ndaragwa MP Jeremiah Kioni said his side would be pushing for the exclusive use of the manual system in the coming elections.

Jubilee Party secretary-general Jeremiah Kioni. Photo: Courtesy.

This, he said, would form the basis of the thorough reforms Azimio wants to push in the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) in a bid to weed out electoral malpractices.

"Without any doubt, we will join hands to reform IEBC so that we don’t have a system that can be remotely controlled. Electronic voting can be manipulated but still present figures that look genuine. There are many developed countries that started with the electronic election but reverted to manual after they realised the mess," said Kioni.

Kioni is the secretary-general of the Jubilee Party, a pioneer political outfit in the Azimio La Umoja One Kenya Coalition Party.

To echo Kioni's sentiments would be Azimio leader Raila Odinga who has vowed to push for reforms in the electoral agency and the Judiciary.

Speaking in the same PG, Raila observed that the Judiciary had been turned into a cabal of "fraudsters" who connive with politicians to deprive Kenyans of their political will.

In the run-up to the 2027 General Election, Raila said radical changes must be undertaken in the Judiciary and the IEBC.

"There is corruption, incompetence, and capture of the IEBC. You have noticed the corruption and thuggery of the Supreme Court judges. The words used against us have never been used in our courts even in the dark days of single-party rule,” said Raila.