Seven candidates contesting in the August General Election have been surprised after noting that they were among the 92,277 listed as dead voters in the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) register.
The seven have since been de-listed along with thousands other names that the IEBC scraped from the dead voters list.
According to the Commission, the mistake error occurred when the mistaken individuals went to report their relatives as deceased but were instead enlisted as the dead ones.
"The figure of about 92,000 reduced by 3,765 after we realised that some of those listed as dead were actually people who are still alive who had gone to report their loved ones as dead but were erroneously listed as the ones who had died. In fact, seven of them are candidates in the elections" IEBC Commissioner Roselyne Akombe explained.
Though she did not divulge names of the said candidates, she went on to explain that the occurrence was the reason why a high number of dead voters still appeared in the voter register.
The same was reiterated by IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati who added that in general, the Registrar of Births and Deaths kept poor records of deaths in Kenya.
"As a country, our record of dead people is very poor and there is a need to empower the Civil Registration Services (CRS) so that we enhance its capacity of keeping records.
"People die every day. There are some that will even die on August 7, just hours to the elections.We really cannot have a register completely rid of dead voters. But I am 100 per cent confident that the technology will work and no dead voter will vote because they have no biometrics," Chebukati explained.
