The January 15 election was dominated by reports of faulty Biometric Voter Verification Kits. Yet the delayed delivery of ballot papers and other essential polling materials represented a quieter, but equally consequential, logistical failure.
The Electoral Commission had mandated a nationwide 7:00 a.m. start to polling, requiring that materials and personnel reach both remote and urban stations well before dawn. In practice, however, the last-mile delivery collapsed in many areas.
Kira Municipality MP Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda noted that although election materials arrived in Wakiso District as early as a week before polling day, many stations within Kira Municipality still received their supplies late.
In his constituency, ballot papers, ballot boxes, and other critical materials arrived after 9:00 a.m., rendering the official polling start time meaningless, even if the biometric machines had functioned perfectly. Journalists from Uganda Radio Network observed similar scenes in multiple parts of the country.
In Nansana, for instance, materials reached several polling stations at or after 8:30 a.m., with some polling officers themselves arriving late. At St. Joseph Catholic Church polling station, staff only took up their positions at about 7:20 a.m. On election day, Nansana resident Dorcus Nakasi also raised concerns, saying she and other voters had arrived early in anticipation of the 7:00 a.m. opening.
“We came at 5:00 a.m., and nothing was here. Not even the polling materials. All we saw were military personnel patrolling the area. Now the materials have just arrived, and some people who came early have gone back home,” Nakasi noted.
Election observers, including teams from the African Union, COMESA, IGAD, and the East African Community, documented similar patterns across the country.
Tolbert Musinguzi, the Returning Officer for Wakiso District, one of Uganda’s most populous and politically sensitive areas, acknowledged in a post-election interview that delays had hampered the timely arrival of ballot papers and other essential materials at many polling stations.
According to Musinguzi, district-level plans required materials to reach even the most remote polling centres by 6:00 a.m., allowing polling to begin as scheduled at 7:00 a.m. “Every election has its challenges.
Here at the district, we had the fleet and personnel ready, but we were delayed by the fact that the BVVK machines had not arrived. We wanted them to be transported together with the rest of the polling materials.”
Faced with the delay in receiving the Biometric Voter Verification Kits, officials in Wakiso opted to dispatch the available materials first, with the machines to follow later. At the time the Electoral Commission delayed the decision to switch to the manual register, most polling stations in Wakiso had still not received the BVVKs.
A critical question, however, remains unanswered: why were the BVVK machines not transported to Wakiso alongside the other polling materials during the initial dispatch? The Electoral Commission has yet to provide a clear explanation for this separation, fuelling suspicions of deeper coordination failures or possible mismanagement.
The problem was not confined to Wakiso. In Mukono District, Dr Livingstone Ssewanyana, a founding Executive Director of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, expressed disbelief that polling materials arrived at his station at 8:30 a.m., despite it being located barely 20 metres from the district returning officer’s office. “I was surprised,” he said. “And I’m told that much of this comes down to the distribution plan and the vehicles they hire.”
Dr Ssewanyana, who also serves as a UN Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, argued that for an exercise held only once every five years, better planning should eliminate such avoidable delays, delays that inevitably cast doubt on the credibility of the entire electoral process.
Uganda’s elections require the distribution of millions of sensitive ballots to more than 50,000 polling stations, including island communities on Lake Victoria and hard-to-reach border districts. While the Electoral Commission’s task is massive, it is not unique.
Other institutions, such as the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB), conduct a strikingly similar nationwide logistics operation every year. UNEB delivers high-stakes examination papers across the country, often under tight timelines and heavy security, yet materials consistently arrive on time. Reporters who have covered UNEB’s distribution process over several years point to sharp contrasts in approach.
UNEB establishes firm delivery timelines weeks in advance, requires supervisors to sign off at regional hubs, and imposes strict penalties on drivers for deviations. District inspectors also conduct pre-distribution road surveys, assessing bridges, feeder roads, and alternative routes, measures that could have mitigated the “last-mile” failures cited during this election.
Unlike UNEB, the Electoral Commission operates under heavier political pressure and handles larger volumes. Still, the core logistics challenge remains the same: timely, secure delivery to thousands of locations on a single day.
Dr Ssewanyana argues that the Electoral Commission could begin rebuilding eroded public trust by adopting logistics standards similar to those used by UNEB, standards that prioritise meticulous planning, rigorous route mapping, and the use of reliable, vetted transport fleets with clear contingency options.
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