Uganda recruits 142,000 poll officials

Uganda’s Electoral Commission is recruiting 253,695 temporary polling-day workers for the 2025-26 general elections, not 142,000. (ec.or.ug) The commission’s job advert says it needs one presiding officer and five polling assistants at each polling station countrywide. Presiding officers are paid 50,000 Ugandan shillings per polling day, while polling assistants are paid 40,000 shillings. (ec.or.ug) Those staffing numbers line up with the commission’s latest election statistics: Uganda has 50,739 polling stations for the 2025-26 cycle. Multiply that by six officials per station and the total reaches 304,434, though the advert covers 253,695 posts for presiding officers and polling assistants alone. (ec.or.ug 1) (ec.or.ug 2) The same Electoral Commission update put the voter roll at 21,681,491 people as of November 13, 2025, up from 18,103,603 in the 2021 cycle. The share of women on the register was 53%, compared with 47% men. (ec.or.ug 1) (ec.or.ug 2) This recruitment drive sits inside a bigger overhaul of Uganda’s voting map. In August 2024, the commission said it would merge underused stations, split overcrowded ones, relocate congested or contested sites, and create new stations where needed. (ec.or.ug) The 2024 reorganization set new thresholds: stations with more than 1,200 voters in Kampala and more than 900 elsewhere could be split. The commission said the changes were meant to keep voter numbers manageable and reduce travel distance. (ec.or.ug) Uganda’s revised election roadmap scheduled presidential campaigns from September 29, 2025, to January 12, 2026, and parliamentary campaigns from November 10, 2025, to January 12, 2026. The polling period for presidential, parliamentary and local government elections was set for January 12 to February 9, 2026. (ec.or.ug) The specific claim about a ban on daycare provision inside schools ahead of voting did not appear in the Electoral Commission materials reviewed here. What the public record does show is a large-scale staffing push tied to a much bigger polling-station network than Uganda used in 2021. (ec.or.ug 1) (ec.or.ug 2) The bottom line is that Uganda’s election preparation story is about scale: more polling stations, more registered voters, and more than a quarter-million temporary officials to run the vote. (ec.or.ug)