I covered the opening of a Nairobi polling centre this morning.

Loose general impressions in comparison with 2007: pre-opening lines seemed even bigger than 2007; large numbers of people got out to que in the pre-dawn; actual voting quite slow as should be expected with new and complicated process and six ballots versus three. There was some stream of periodic boisterousness from people waiting and concerned by bottlenecks–things were quiter in 2007.

One thing that annoyed me was to see that the ballot papers are all white paper except for the color on the front only to correspond with the specific race (i.e. “purple” for woman’s representative to National Assembly). This means when you fold the six ballots for secrecy and to drop them in the color-coded box they look the same. My civil society colleagues raised this issue, among many, with the IEBC. The IEBC reported to one member of the civil society coalition who then circulated the response, that the cheaper ballot papers colored only on one side were only for the “mock election” testing, and that today, voters would have the intended fully colored paper.

Apparently not so. Not that the problem in itself is of such magnitude perhaps, but the quality of the information and means of communication from the IEBC were lacking on this point. And of course it would be good to know, even though it will be too late, what happened in the procurement process to cause this.

Enjoyed meeting diplomatic observers from the Danish Embassy and the Eritrean Foreign Ministry.