Agency
The country has registered its lowest voter turnout in the Presidential and Parliamentary elections on record, according to results declared by the Electoral Commission on Saturday evening.
This unprecedented civic withdrawal highlights a growing crisis of public confidence in presidential elections.
Official figures indicate that just over eleven million voters participated in the election out of slightly more than twenty-one million registered voters, translating into a turnout of just above fifty percent.
This means that more than ten million eligible voters did not cast a presidential ballot on polling day, a striking indicator of civic withdrawal.
The Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) has expressed concern over the trend.
Pauline Nansamba, the Director for Complaints, Investigations, and Legal Services, described the low turnout as troubling, noting that voting is a fundamental civic right that many Ugandans appear to be abandoning.
Political analyst and human rights defender Dr Livingstone Ssewanyana attributed the poor turnout partly to systemic failures on polling day, particularly the malfunctioning of biometric voter verification kits (BVVKs).
