It is the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court judgment affirming the supposed win of the Jubilants’ presidential candidate.

This past week, Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice, a coalition of governance, human-rights and legal organisations, convened a reflection to mark the anniversary. It included contributions from electoral and legal experts, as well as Cord, the Jubilants and Narc.

Willis Otieno reminded us that elections are a process. And that problems with process ultimately resulted in a repeat of the very same problems experienced in 2007. Lack of clarity about registered voters and therefore turnout. The transmission of results and the outcome.

Problems with procurement aside, the distribution of biometric voter registration kits was uneven, meaning some parts of the country had more opportunities to register than others. The BVR results were not integrated with the Electronic Voter Identification Devices, meaning the EVIDs were empty shells on polling day.

The final voters’ register was neither publicised, gazetted nor inspected. The mobile infrastructure to transmit results from the constituency to national level failed, political party agents were removed from the national tallying centre and there thus was no verification of supposed results nationally.

In short, the integrity of the results remains as unclear as it was in 2007.

As concerns the Supreme Court judgment, James Orengo reminded us, quoting Lord Atkins: “The courts are more executive-minded than the executive itself.”

The 1992 presidential petition brought by Kenneth Matiba was thrown out on the basis that his signature was questionable. The 1997 presidential petition was thrown out on the basis that Daniel arap Moi had not been personally served.

The upshot is that the years between 2007 and 2013 were lost. We are now almost half-way to another election. Will citizens vote if they do not believe their vote will be respected?

How can the IEBC continue to be the electoral management body when its chair demonstrated such bias before the Supreme Court? Will aggrieved political parties turn to the Supreme Court to arbitrate electoral disputes? How to avert disaster?

Ideas put forward varied. One suggestion was to reconstitute IEBC as a bipartisan body of “political party representatives.” As returning officers inevitably become complicit in local politics, the idea is to arbitrarily re-post them to different constituencies shortly before polling.

As mischief always occurs with the transmission of results from constituency to national level, do away with the national tallying centre and announce tallies at constituency level, observed and mandatorily signed-off by ROs, political party agents and observers. With the media immediately broadcasting these tallies.

As the Supreme Court failed in its first and most significant test, the suggestion is that it be reconstituted to include external members less prone to possible bias and compromise. Finally, citizens must demand the immediate integration of the BVR into the EVIDs and gazetting of the voters’ register for continuous public scrutiny.

L. Muthoni Wanyeki is Amnesty International’s regional director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes