A couple of weeks ago, we ran a story that the guild government of Uganda Christian University (UCU) had introduced an online voting system called the E’chagua that would be rolled out for the university guild elections.
On the 3 July 2019, an election was a conducted to demonstrate how the system would be used once officially launched. Students were asked to volunteer in the exercise to vote amongst three candidates Bobi Wine, Mugisha Muntu and Yoweri Museveni who had been described by some of the students at the university as the “key figures in Uganda politics and are likely to contest in the 2021 presidential elections”.
The results out of 763 students that volunteered in the demo election revealed that Bobi Wine beat Museveni with a landslide victory of 52 percent as against the incumbent’s 21.7 percent. Gen. Muntu emerged second with 26 percent.
The votes in total add to about 99.7 percent. It is not indicated what happened to the 0.3 percent insanely accounting to 2.289 votes from 3 students. As usual, there is always an issue that comes up anything that is digital. It is not certain whether the system malfunctioned or those were the true results from the system, but the unaccounted for votes do not seem to be believable. Reliability of the system is yet to be confirmed and the same applies to whether the university would accept the system to be used widely in the university guild elections.
According to the guild, the demo was intended to create awareness of the system and was quick to disclaim that the results were not intended to represent any actual opinions of the students.
The electoral commission of the guild chair Henry Arinaitwe was quoted as saying that there was no hidden agenda behind the vote.
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