Sarah in Uganda

February 18th, 2011: Presidential Election Day in Uganda. The day has finally arrived. Today Ugandan businesses, schools, and farming will pause so that the citizens of Uganda can go to the polls to vote for their president. The ballots are all paper ballots, marked by either a thumb print or tick mark, next to your candidate. On the ballots, there is a picture of each candidate along with the symbol for their party in order to allow a fair election for those who are illiterate. Just know your party’s symbol and color (i.e. yellow school bus for NRM or green hoe for DP) and you’re ready to vote.

Although this sounds all well and good, there is still the issue of voter registration. There are no absentee ballots so where you originally registered to vote is where you have to vote this election (unless of course you changed your registration but no one I have talked to has done this). This means that if you registered to vote in Ddegeya but now are now working in Kampala, you would have to come back to the village in order to vote. Or like for one of the teachers that I work with, she registered in Kampala not knowing she would be working at a school outside of Masaka and due to the expense of returning to Kampala will not be voting. As a result, a whole slew of mostly young adult voters will not be heading to the polls today. 

For those who don’t know, the incumbent, Y.K. Museveni, has been in power for 25 years and is running again this election period. Most predict he will win again especially since he is running against 7 other candidates. So for one of those candidates to unify the nation to get enough of the votes will be hard. But we shall see this weekend after Ugandans go to the polls and follow Pee Diddy’s instructions to “Rock the Vote!”. 

Billboard in Masaka town encouraging people to go vote.