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Electronic systems meltdown causes long delays, affects credibility of poll

Saturday March 09 2013
vote

A polling clerk verifies details of a voter. Photo/FILE

Recent efforts to reform the management of elections in Kenya received a major setback following the malfunctioning of electronic transmission of votes, putting the credibility of the presidential poll on trial.

The system, based on the acquisition of one-way phone lines from telecoms operator Safaricom connected to servers at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s national tallying centre at the Bomas of Kenya, was a key measure in improving the credibility of the presidential poll, especially the relay and central tallying of the results.

Manual transmission of results was blamed in the Kriegler Report for delays and manipulation of results that were at the core of the country’s electoral debacle and bloody post-election violence in 2007/8.

When IEBC chairman Ahmed Isaak Hassan admitted the collapse of the system on Thursday evening, he was merely confirming fears that had already found widespread expression in Kenya’s hyperactive social media.

The commission was forced to revert to the much-discredited manual transmission and tallying of votes from the country’s 291 constituencies.

An earlier promise by Mr Hassan to issue the presidential poll results 48 hours after the closure of voting could not be met, inviting much anxiety and speculation among an already restless population.

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The manual receipt of results and tallying was still going on late Friday afternoon, taking an exacting toll on the economy, as business activity remained low.

Mr Hassan attributed the malfunction to a software bug in a programme developed in-house by the IEBC’s IT department, which, besides being slow, also automatically inflated figures received as rejected votes.

To illustrate the scale of the anomaly, the electronically transmitted results showed a total of over 338,000 rejected votes in the space of just a few hours compared with just over 58,000 rejected votes by 6.30 pm on Thursday evening.

Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Coalition was the first to raise the red flag, saying it would not accept the inclusion of the rejected votes in the final tally.

In the coalition’s parlance, the rejected votes did not constitute the “all votes cast” that the Constitution speaks of. According to the writ of the supreme law, a winning presidential candidate must garner at least “50 per cent plus one of the total votes cast.”

The stakes were high because the figure for rejected votes, if included in the final tally, would actually determine whether the poll would have an outright winner, or the country would be subjected to a potentially bruising run-off.

‘Manipulated’ system

On Thursday, the Raila Odinga-led CORD (Coalition for Reforms and Democracy) running mate Kalonzo Musyoka also weighed in with a claim that the vote tallying process had been manipulated and called for a stop to it.

“There has been a total failure of the electronic vote transmission system... we have evidence that the results have actually been doctored,” said Mr Musyoka, adding that in some constituencies, the number of voters recorded as having cast their ballots far exceeded the number of registered voters, while alluding to divisions within the commission.

In a late press conference Thursday evening, Mr Hassan discounted the possibility of outside interference and affirmed unity among the commissioners.

When the dust settles on the closely contested election, the IEBC will have to answer public concerns about the apparent failure of its expensively assembled IT-based electoral management systems and what it portends for electoral reform in the country. The question will also have to be asked as to whether these failures were by design or default and to whose eventual benefit.

The first to fail were the voter identification kits, which on polling day, could not be used in at least 80 per cent of the polling stations.

Polling clerks, frustrated by passwords that did not work and batteries that had not been charged, among other glaring mistakes, were forced to resort to the manual identification of voters.

The use of the kits was meant to stop multiple voting and such practices as people voting using the names of long-dead voters.

The electoral commission announced in January it had procured 30,000 of the electronic devices, known as the poll book.

“The poll book will identify the voter before he proceeds to cast his ballot. It will capture the data of the voters within a single polling station,” Mr Issack Hassan had said.

“It verifies that you are indeed the registered voter and also accounts for the number of those who have come to vote,” he added, explaining that the gadgets were different from the biometric voter registration kits used to register voters.

After the actual voting, focus turned to the Result Transmission System facilitated through software imbedded in mobile telephone handsets being used by the IEBC officials.

Next Technologies denied in a press statement that it has provided the system that is alleged to have failed.

Further investigations by The EastAfrican revealed that while Next Technologies had won the tender to develop the results transmission system floated by the International Federation for Electoral Systems (IFES) in December last year, the IEBC officials in charge of IT declined to use the company’s services, insisting that they had developed their own result transmission system.

That system is believed to be the one Next Technologies had developed earlier for the IEBC and used in the 2010 referendum and subsequent by-elections.

An engineer from Safaricom, who spoke on condition that his name not be used due to the sensitivity of the matter, argued that the IEBC system could have malfunctioned due to either unauthorised access by an “outside party” or the introduction of a rogue code by the electoral body’s IT experts during the development of the software, which apparently was done in-house.

It also emerged that IEBC had been warned before the elections that their results transmission system was not election-ready but that advice was ignored.

ALSO READ: Kenya on the spot over readiness to conduct poll

IEBC’s communications and corporate affairs manager Tabitha Mutemi did not respond to calls and SMS on this matter.

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