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| Kenya longs for peace. Photograph: Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images |
On
March 4th, Kenya, East Africa's largest economist held its first general
elections since the new constitution was approved in a national referendum in
2010. As part of this deep legal
transformation, robust electoral reforms were introduced to set the new grounds
for credible, and legitimate elections.
Kenya
has been under intense scrutiny by national and international organizations
since the 2007, when the losing candidate in the presidential elections, Raila
Amollo Odinga, refused to concede defeat alleging a massive fraud had been
conducted. His supported rioted the streets and ethnic violence erupted. More
than 1,200 killed and hundreds were displaced. The political, social and
economic consequences of such episodes are still fresh in the memory of all Kenyans.
To
avoid the recurrence of a similar tragedy, and conduct peaceful and more transparent
elections, Kenya embarked on a project to modernize its voting system by
automating certain phases of the election cycle. Biometric technology was introduced
to increase accuracy of the voter roll and minimize the impact of vote
impersonation. Also, an electronic transmission of results was implemented to
speed up the result consolidation and publication process.
Unfortunately,
the newly formed Independent Electoral and
Boundaries Commission (IEBC) came short of accomplishing their noble
goals. Both automation processes were poorly managed, causing a cumbersome
voting experience for most voters, and delaying result publication for almost an
entire week.
Prime
Minister Raila Odinga is again playing a role that is becoming familiar to him,
claiming fraud. He laments that the billions spent in technology for voter identification
and vote tallying claiming rendered poor results. "Two days after the vote, the electronic tallying
process was discarded and counting began afresh, manually. That too turned out
to be flawed exercise in which, among other things, there was massive tampering
with the IEBC voter register" he stated.
Although it is
early for international observers to conclude that a massive fraud was carried
out, they have acknowledged the technical problems and delays. The biometric
platform, developed by a partnership between the Government of Canada and a
subcontractor, Morpho Canda Inc, reported numerous failures causing voters to wait in line
for hours before casting a vote.
Also, the system in
charge of the transmission of results and processing the data broke down
forcing a manual count of the votes. The services used to provide the tallying
and result publishing services were provided by different companies.
Utilizing
an mobile App designed by IFES
and installed on cell phones distributed to each polling stations, authorities
were supposed to use Safaricom (a
leading mobile network operator in Kenya) telecommunication company) SIM cards
to send results transmitted via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). Servers
in consolidation centers, managed by Next
Technologies, were supposed to process results and upload them to a Google
hosted website.
Acknowledging all difficulties experienced by voters to cast
a vote, and knowing results, James Oswago, Chief executive of Kenya's IEBC,
stated "none of those reasons is malevolent, none of those reasons was
intended to keep you here needlessly. We tried our best."
In the
light of such complex political landscape, and with the 2007 chaos fresh in
everyone's memory, we hope the technical glitches do not assume political
dimensions.
