As another high-stakes election approaches, a familiar confrontation has returned. The Opposition accuses the State of preparing the ground for rigging. Authorities respond that they are merely enforcing the law. At the centre of this clash is a deceptively technical rule: whether voters may remain near polling stations after casting their ballots.
The legal provision in contention is clear, and limited. Section 33(3)-(4) of the Presidential Elections Act, 2005, requires voters to queue at least 20 metres from the voting table, and states that after voting, all persons other than election officials, candidates, agents, and observers must also stay 20 metres away from that table. The law regulates proximity to the voting table, not a blanket ban on citizens witnessing the process.
Yet in practice, this narrow rule has been expanded into something far broader: A directive to disperse voters entirely from polling stations, often enforced by armed personnel. What looks like legal housekeeping has become a struggle over who controls visibility at the most sensitive democratic moment – the counting of votes. The Electoral Commission (EC) chairperson, Justice Simon Byabakama, insists it is acting within the law. The Chief of Defence Forces, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, says they are preventing disorder. But for many citizens and Opposition leaders, the issue is not legality alone. It is trust.
Ugandans are allowed to vote. That is rarely disputed. What increasingly concerns citizens is what happens after the ballot is placed in the box. When voters are pushed far from polling stations, those stations cease to be civic spaces and become controlled administrative zones. Voting is visible; counting is not. The Opposition’s fear is not that rigging must occur, but that rigging becomes impossible to disprove when citizens are excluded from proximity. Transparency fails not because fraud is proven, but because verification is denied.
Democracy, reduced to paperwork behind a cordon of uniforms, begins to resemble a ritual rather than a shared civic act. The growing presence of soldiers throughout the cities and now at polling stations intensifies suspicion. Authorities argue this guarantees peace. But peace enforced by armed men is never neutral. It reshapes behaviour, silences questions, and discourages observation. Even when no force is used, the message is unmistakable: Stay back. In a political environment dominated for decades by President Museveni, neutrality is not assumed; it must be demonstrated. Elections policed by guns may be orderly, but order is not the same as legitimacy.
The problem is not the existence of the 20-metre rule. It is how it is deployed. When the law is enforced selectively, it ceases to reassure the public and instead protects the process from scrutiny. A rule designed to manage queues becomes a tool to manage citizens. At the heart of this dispute lies a principle rarely stated but widely felt: the right to witness. Voting is not complete when a ballot is cast; it is complete when that ballot is counted openly and credibly. Citizens who remain near polling stations are not necessarily obstructing democracy.
Many believe they are safeguarding it. In countries with contested electoral histories, public presence is not paranoia; it is institutional memory. Democracies mature when institutions earn trust. They decay when trust is demanded but not demonstrated. Physical distance creates political distance. Visibility becomes invisibility. Participation becomes passive acceptance. When citizens are told to vote and leave, democracy is reduced to a transaction rather than a shared civic act. Uganda does not lack election laws. There is no consensus on whether elections belong to institutions alone or to citizens collectively.
If the EC seeks credibility, it must confront a simple truth: transparency is not disorder. Crowds are not chaos by default. Democracy does not fear witnesses; it depends on them. Until that lesson is embraced, the battle over 20 metres will continue – not as a legal debate, but as a symbol of a democracy struggling to decide whether it wants to be seen.