Electronic voting shall not be implemented by the 2012 General election in Kenya and voters will still cast their votes manually. This was announced by Independent Interim Electoral Commission (IIEC) of Kenya chairman Isaack Hassan. Hassan was speaking at the opening of an electronic voting technologies conference that IIEC is hosting starting Thursday 22nd to Friday 23rd September at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC). The conference has attracted 40 exhibitors from both Kenya and abroad.
Hassan also announced that the Commission had successfully been piloting the use of technology through electronic voter registration and electronic vote transmission. "Prior to the General Elections of 2007, ECK (Electoral Commission of Kenya), had started exploring the use of technology in elections. But unfortunately , ECK did not manage to implement some of the technological solutions it was pursuing, " Hassan says.
"With the support of development partners , we have been able to test and implement technologies that address some of the critical areas in election such as multiple registration and voting , speed of transmitting results, storage and retrieval and so on, " Hassan adds.

In August 2009, IIEC , IIEBRC(The Interim Independent Electoral and Boundaries Review Commission), and the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs with support from UNDP and IED organised a national stakeholders conference on election reforms . The conference recommended that the manual process of collecting, collating , transmission and tallying of votes should be brought to an end.

IIEC would continue in implementing the use of electronic voter registration and electronic vote tallying , though Hassan did not clarify to what extent the commission would deploy the technologies in the upcoming elections.

Hassan says that "IIEC is not looking for fancy, nice-to-have gadgets and software." Whatever the IIEC would settle for must be effective , sustainable and above all makes financial sense to have. He also terms electronic voting as "a brave step that must be nurtured slowly. "

India had taken almost 30 years to implement electronic voting while Brazil took 15 years. India though had to implement a paper audit trail for every ballot cast in an effort to improve integrity and transparency. Germany has banned electronic voting systems unless their integrity can be verified while Nigeria has banned all electronic voting and use of electronics during voting.

"Transparency has greater emphasis than efficiency when it comes to electronic voting, " Hassan says. It was also deemed difficult to deploy electronic voting in the time left between now and when the elections would be held in 2012.