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{
    "id": 1480931,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1480931/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 164,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Oketch Gicheru",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": null,
    "content": "As a country, we should choose to believe that it is an offence if you are turning 18 years old and cannot get the voters card as you also acquire you ID. It should be an offence. In fact, the issue of voter's card is something that this Bill should help us question. If you have an ID card that is genuine, why then do you need a voter's card? Our law says that at 18 years old you should get an ID card and you are also a viable voter. Why then must this issue of voter's card be prohibitive for young people to vote? We must explore an amendment that I am bringing to this House on making sure that young people in this country can get their IDs or voter's card on time or use their IDs as their voter's card. I will be exploring that. Second issue that is important in the registration process, is being able to clean our registers on time. At any given time, we must have a duration under which the commissioners must clean the register. If it is not cleaned, it will be like we have seen in a number of elections where a register is not hygiene to conduct an election, such that we do not know which voters are in the register vis-a-vis those that are viable to vote. The alteration of results happened because of the issue of voter registers that the commission is being paid to take care of. This is something that should happen on a rolling basis. Mass voter registration should not happen when we are almost going for elections. Commissioners want to run around yet sometimes the audit of the voter register is not done properly. On this issue of registration, there are a number of offences that the Commission has done in this country. I do not want to go into details but I will be pushing amendments on the registration of voters that have not been captured well in the offence that I am seeing here. The second offence which is very important is the role of the Commission vis-a-vis that of the secretariat in terms of looking at procurement as a process. Madam Temporary Speaker, if we do not solve the issue of procurement violations on election materials, even if you hold an officer who is sitting on the day of election on some offences, the election will have been rigged a long time ago if there is no hygiene in our procurement processes. There are a number of violations, that I believe we must explore. I will be pushing those specific amendments on what constitutes offences of procurement in nature. Some procurement of election materials start way before the election year starts. There are a number of indices that have been seen and by the time an election comes in place--- If you were to reflect on the election that we had in 2017 that was nullified by the Supreme Court and then juxtapose it with the election that happened in 2022, you will find that the filth of those electoral processes happened at procurement. These includes the laws that our Commission ends up signing with vendors abroad. It is extremely critical to hold them accountable as an offence. For instance, if as a Commissioner or staffer of the Commission, you find a vendor and procure an electronic system that is supposed to deliver an election and then in that contract, you do not protect the country's data such that institutions such as Smartmatic have more rights on the data in the system than Kenyans, signing such agreements is tantamount to an The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Director, Hansard and AudioServices, Senate."
}