Try The Gambia’s marble voting system

On December 4,2021, the people of The Gambia participated in the first election following the 23-year rule by former president Yahya Jammeh. There was immense interest as about 900,000 voters exercised their right to choose a leader. 

It must have been exciting for the voters to imagine a ballot paper without Jammeh. Observers like yours truly looked forward to the paperless balloting system. It is a unique system of voting that uses marbles as ballot papers and drums as ballot boxes. 

This distinctive system integrates a range of other ordinary tools: bells (like bicycle bells), trays, sieves, sand and/or sow dust.It is these everyday things that are used to count and secure every vote cast. 

Ordinarily, this menu looks ex- tensive and complicated. But it is not. This system of voting with marbles was first formally used in The Gambia in the 1960s.Due to its simplicity, it was and remains user-friendly for the less literate people. Moreover, it is difficult to cheat. 

In the place of ballot boxes, there is a metal cylinder (drum) with a hole in the top.The containers are arranged on a table inside a voting booth. Each drum is painted with a particular party colour and the pho- to of the candidate represent- ing the party is pasted on the drum for ease of identification. The secrecy of the ballot is guaranteed by ensuring that no one else is able to see the choice that the voter inside the booth has made. 

To cast a vote, a voter receives a marble from an election official, proceeds to the voting booth and drops the marble in- to the drum representing the chosen candidate.The marble rolls down a small pipe into the drum. As the marble drops in the drum, it triggers a little bell, which notifies election officials and observers sitting outside the voting booth of a successful vote. Officials and observers are able to hear if anyone tries to vote more than once. 

The final tool used in this unique system is the counting tray. A er the voting has ended, marbles from each of the candidates’ drums are emptied into a square tray that is dotted with 200 holes. The holes in the trays get evenly filled with marbles. The total is then tallied and re- corded on the spot for representatives of candidates, voters and observers. 

This system enables counting officials to quickly see the number of votes cast in each drum.My Gambian driver, whose name I only got as Al- haji, credits their system as simple, trustable and transparent. His sentiments are re-echoed by communities in and outside the capital Banjul. In a country where literacy levels remain generally low, the marble system that doesn’t involve much reading or writing remains friendly. 

The system is practically considered to have the advantage of low cost and simplicity both for understanding how to vote and for counting.It also settles the issue of invalid or spoilt votes, which is evident in most- ballot paper-based elections. 

Unfortunately, this time-test- ed system seems to be facing stiff resistance from an invisible force.While some people think that the push to ditch the system is motivated by multinationals that want to make mil- lions from supplying classic ballot merchandise to The Gambia, others argue that the full- proof nature of the marble system is its own disadvantage – it is diffcult to cheat. 

A close friend who has been working on the Gambian elections for some time believes that a few unscrupulous political characters now need a system that they could easily manipulate. On the face of it, the invisible arguments in favour of scrapping the marble system seem to only point to the increasing number of political candidates in elections twinned with the complexities that would come with multiple drums for a single election. 

In a world where cheating elections is unfortunately becoming a mainstay, the Gambian marble system of voting could be a possible panacea to rising electoral fraud and its attendant effects. This fits well in the grand scheme of solving global problems with African solutions. 

Mr Crispin Kaheru, Commissioner, Uganda Human Rights Commission.