By Praise Aloikin Opoloje
The most effective disinformation doesn’t announce itself as falsehood. It works through procedure, delay, selective speech, and silence. In Uganda’s most recent electoral cycle, the Electoral Commission did not need to openly lie to mislead the public. Its communications, omissions, and timing were sufficient. What emerged was an institutional pattern in which the Commission became an accessory to an election whose legitimacy it was constitutionally mandated to protect.
Disinformation by Silence
In democratic systems, election management bodies are expected to speak clearly, early, and consistently. In Uganda, the opposite has increasingly become the norm. When opposition rallies were violently disrupted, polling agents arrested, or voters intimidated, the Electoral Commission often said nothing at all. Silence, in this context, was not neutrality. It was an intervention.
When the Commission did speak, it frequently waited for sustained public pressure, international attention, or media outrage. By then, the damage had already been done. Silence allowed abuse to become normalised, while delayed statements created the illusion of responsiveness without altering outcomes.
The Commission’s statement on “violent confrontations” during campaigns illustrates this strategy. By describing one-sided, unprovoked attacks by armed security forces on unarmed civilians as “confrontations,” the Commission avoided factual falsehood while fundamentally distorting reality. Language became a shield to blur responsibility and evade accountability.
An institution tasked under Article 61 of the Constitution with ensuring free and fair elections cannot claim neutrality while refusing to name violations. Silence, in such circumstances, is political.
Technical Language as Obstruction
The Commission’s communication strategy relied heavily on dense technical language, deployed selectively and often at the last minute. Voters were told about procedures, technologies, and legal requirements without meaningful civic education. This wasn’t accidental.
Voter education is a constitutional duty of the Electoral Commission. Yet millions of Ugandans entered polling day without adequate guidance on how to vote, how to verify their details, or how to respond when systems failed. Both voter location slips and candidates lists were delayed. The national voters’ register was withheld from opposition parties until days before the election, without lawful justification, despite a clear legal requirement to release it earlier.
These delays mattered. Elections are logistical exercises as much as political ones. Late information narrows the space for correction, scrutiny, and challenge. It transforms administrative decisions into final outcomes. When citizens are overwhelmed by jargon but deprived of clarity, disinformation thrives because people are excluded.
The BVVKs and the Illusion of Preparedness
Nothing exposed this pattern more starkly than the handling of the Biometric Voter Verification Kits (BVVKs). Prior to polling day, Electoral Commission officials repeatedly assured the public that the kits were fully tested, reliable, and capable of operating for up to 20 hours. They described a system that would prevent impersonation and ensure electoral integrity.
On polling day, the kits failed across multiple stations. When this happened, the Commission issued guidance on social media instructing officials to proceed using the national voters’ register. This guidance was issued during a nationwide internet shutdown. The contradiction was striking. If communication and voter guidance were truly important, the Commission would have advised against an internet blackout. Instead, it posted instructions that the majority of citizens, polling agents, and even election officials couldn’t access. This was a structural breach for which someone must be held accountable, and a transparent audit must be done.
Internet Shutdowns and Plausible Deniability
The Commission didn’t order the internet shutdown. That fact could be used as a defence. But responsibility isn’t limited to authorship. An electoral body serious about transparency would have publicly opposed a blackout that crippled communication, monitoring, and verification. It didn’t.
Instead, it carried on as though the shutdown were administratively irrelevant, issuing online statements, publishing results in batches without detailed breakdowns, and expecting trust in a process that citizens couldn’t observe.
Disinformation here took the form of omission. By refusing to contest an action that undermined electoral integrity, the Commission became complicit in its effects.
Contradicting the Law Without Saying So
Perhaps the clearest example of disinformation by omission was the Commission’s instruction that voters should “vote and go home.” Repeated by security agencies, this directive directly contradicted Section 31(4) of the Presidential Elections Act, which allows voters to remain within 20 metres of polling stations.
The Commission didn’t explain this contradiction. It didn’t clarify the law. It didn’t defend citizens’ rights. Instead, it allowed fear to do the work. In a country where remaining near a polling station can invite arrest or worse, ambiguity becomes coercive.
When institutions refuse to clarify rights, power fills the gap.
Selective Enforcement and Manufactured “Technicalities”
The Commission’s treatment of candidate nominations further reveals how omission and selective action functioned as disinformation. Several opposition candidates, particularly from the National Unity Platform, were disqualified after nomination on alleged technical grounds. Missing documents. Duplicate signatures. Clerical inconsistencies.
Yet the same Commission conducts pre-verification using computerised systems designed to flag such issues before nomination. Candidates passed these systems and were duly nominated. Only later, often after refusing inducements to withdraw or after gaining visible momentum, were “irregularities” suddenly discovered.
No NRM candidate faced similar treatment, even where petitions were clear-cut.
Here again, the Commission did not need to falsify documents. It weaponised procedure. Verification became retroactive. Law enforcement language replaced democratic responsibility.
An Institution Under Capture
Uganda’s Constitution is clear. The Electoral Commission is meant to be independent. It is meant to organise, conduct, and supervise elections, hear complaints, educate voters, and declare results transparently. What Ugandans witnessed instead was an institution that consistently deferred to power, spoke cautiously where clarity was required, and remained silent where courage was necessary.
Disinformation does not always come in the form of lies. Sometimes it comes as delayed registers, unexplained silences, technical jargon, selective enforcement, and carefully chosen words that blur rather than illuminate. In such environments, citizens aren’t misinformed so much as systematically denied the information they need to exercise sovereignty.
The result is an election that may be legal on paper, but hollow in substance.
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