With just about 9 days to the 2016 presidential elections, many Ugandans are itching to vote. According to the Electoral Commission (EC) of Uganda, almost everything is in place for the February 18th polls and a free and fair election is guaranteed.
But the polling station (accessible here) voter counts released by the Electoral Commission show a major flaw in the upcoming elections. The data shows that there are 15,297,197 voters in Uganda. In terms of gender demographics, the document indicates that there are 8,027,803 Female and 7,249,394 Male voters. However, the sum of female and male voters as indicated in that document yields 15,277,197 NOT the said 15,297,197 (as indicated in the document). Note the difference of 20,000 voters.
When a friend (@enamara) alerted me about this irregularity, I took the data provided by the Electoral Commission and converted the PDF document to Excel and started analyzing the data per polling station. I inserted one more column “Analyzed Voter Count” in the document and I put it side by side with EC’s Voter Count for easy comparison.
First I applied a simple formula to get the sum of Male and Female voters per polling station. Once I got the sums, I compared my sum per polling station with EC’s Voter Count (sum) per polling station. The results speak for themselves, showing the disparities. Many of the polling stations have voters that are ‘unaccounted for’.
The cells highlighted with a red background indicate polling stations with what I can only term as “ghost voters”. Overall, there are 20,000 voters who are unaccounted for based on the gender demographics.
At the moment it is not clear whether this is a systematic way of fixing votes or a “human error”. Regardless of where these 20,000 ghost voters come from, with such flaws, a free and fair election is still a dream. If the electoral commission cannot deal with these simple numbers – especially now that there is no major rush, can we trust them with vote tallying in one day?
Evelyn Namara noticed these disparities 3 days ago and she contacted the commission via Twitter. She has not received a response from the commission since.
.@UgandaEc – Total No. of females = 8,027,803, Total No. of males = 7,249,394 Total sum shows, 15,297,197 instead of 15,277,197 2/3
— Evelyn Namara (@enamara) February 7, 2016
We should condemn this negligence and call up on the Electoral Commission to account for the 20,000 voters.
Download the Statistics by Polling Station – Data Analysed -Uganda – this is the Excel Sheet with data I analyzed. I have password protected the document just to make sure that no “unintended” alterations are made. If you want to do further analysis, tweet me @jssozi and I will give you the password.
You can also use this Electoral Commission Database (http://www.ec.or.ug/ps/list/) to verify number of voters per polling station and also download polling station information including voter registers.
