Kenya held a late-colonial election in 1957, passed through a “frustrated election” in 1961 and reached another poll in May 1963 before independence that December. The study describes voters across Ghana, Kenya and Uganda queuing at polling stations under police observation, with names checked and fingers inked. In Kenya, police were also conspicuous at political meetings, prepared to intervene with batons and tear gas. The secret ballot was presented as a technology of equal citizenship, yet remained surrounded by colonial coercion. The queue gave “one person, one turn” a physical form while arguments continued over settler privilege, centralisation, regional power and competing nationalist parties. It was not a simple line toward independence, but part of a struggle over what kind of state would be inherited.