Despite assurances by IEBC that the Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (KIEMS) has sealed all loopholes for election rigging, including ballot stuffing, there is still numerous ways rigging can happen.
First, IEBC is yet to put up the public portal for announcing the results but is keen to have unaccompanied results – scanned and mailed – reach the commission’s national tallying centre.
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The public portal is to provide live updates on the results transmission after collation. Anyone can check the portal and get the results as announced in real time by the 290 constituency officers and the over 40,000 Wards.
This is critical for counter-checking what IEBC is announcing.
There has been allegations that the IEBC KIEMS software is pirated and can be deployed by third parties, which can go ahead to give results mirroring the ones to be generated by IEBC. Despite these allegations, IEBC has never really cleared the air.
Second, IEBC has designated two officers to receive these results. The question is: what happens if these two officers change every result received from the ground with their own version from ‘God knows where’ and later claim that is what they received?
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From sources, IEBC systems are not integrated. The Biometric voter identification is not integrated with the results transmission system. It means what is mailed to the national office is what has been generated IEBC officials.
There has been collusion before. Remember, there are allegations that IEBC secretariat is infiltrated by NIS agents and Jubilee undercover officials.
This is not far-fetched. At the height of 2007 tallying at KICC, the results received from the various constituencies were being manipulated right at the national headquarter, then given to then ECK chair Samuel Kivuitu to announce and declare.
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In 2013, there were glaring inconsistencies between what IEBC commissioners were announcing and the actual vote summation per constituency which political party agents exposed yet IEBC commissioners continued reading the fake results all the same.
What is surprising about how IEBC has interpreted the court order that declared the constituency level as the final tallying point is just how the commission has sought to remove itself, especially the national office, from any accountability mechanism to ensure the credibility of the election.
It is like IEBC is operating on the dictum: They (NASA) denied us opportunity to verify the results, let them be damned!
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