Presidential results: Nasa spells out conditions to IEBC

The National Super Alliance has demanded access to the electoral commission’s servers as a condition to accepting the outcome of the presidential election.

The coalition announced its conditions on Friday after a three-hour meeting with the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission led by its Chairman Wafula Chebukati.

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Nasa presidential candidate Raila Odinga attended the meeting at the Bomas of Kenya.

James Orengo and Musalia Mudavadi, Mr Odinga’s agents at the National Tallying Centre, also said they had presented a five-page document to Mr Chebukati outlining their demands.

“Give us access to servers where the results have come from,” said Mr Orengo.

“We should be allowed to look at the hacking that took place, particularly between at noon on 8th and on the morning of 9th August.”

Nasa presented the argument that some of the presidential results being relayed are from polling stations, mainly in the Rift Valley, that had not been gazetted.

REPLY

Mr Orengo said they expected a reply from Mr Chebukati before any further progress.

IEBC has denied claims that its servers were hacked and dismissed a document produced by Nasa purporting to show logs on their server.

The commission said while the Nasa document indicates that they were using a Microsoft SQL database, they were actually using a platform run on an Oracle database.  

At the same time, IEBC CEO Ezra Chiloba said they had received 288 of the Form 34B filled at the constituency level and they were getting in touch with returning officers with two remaining forms.

Mr Orengo and Mr Mudavadi said they had decided to come to the National Tallying Centre after seeing a breaking news text that the commission was preparing to release the final result.

15 MINUTES

They arrived in a convoy of about 10 vehicles at about 1 pm, with Mr Odinga in the lead and immediately went into a meeting with the top IEBC officials.

They found Bomas teeming with police officers and members of the special unit that guards the president.

A lounge where important people have been taking breaks since Tuesday had been converted into a room reserved for presidential candidates.

When he arrived 15 minutes later, Deputy President William Ruto was led into that lounge.

Cabinet secretaries, five principal secretaries, Nairobi governor-elect and a host of former and newly elected MPs were also at the National Tallying Centre.

HALF FULL

The previously empty auditorium was half full.

The Nasa heads’ meeting with the commission was the apparent reason Mr Chebukati did not give an update at 2.30pm as the commission had pledged.

The commission on Wednesday set up the process for the verification of the forms sent by  returning officers on the floor of the auditorium at the the National Tallying Centre.

Mr Chiloba told the Nation that the validation process was set up in the open to avoid the criticism in 2013 after it was done in a separate building in the same compound.

There were about 10 desks in a circle on the floor of the auditorium.

FORMS

At the first two desks, the Forms 34B were received  and downloaded by a team headed by Marjan Hussein.

Mr Chiloba said the documents were encrypted and sent through a secure connection.

Mr Hussein and the team were then required to confirm that the documents came from returning officers at the constituency by checking File Transfer Protocol (FTP) as well as email addresses from which they were sent.

They would also call the returning officers.

The team would then make copies of the forms  and share with the presidential candidates’ agents, who had been allocated space at a table next to the one where the results were received and copies made.

SERVER

The agents had also been given a link to the server on which Forms 34A were hosted to enable them compare figures with the data obtained by their agents on the ground.

The copies were also shared with the desks handling the cluster of counties from which the results had been received.

The counties had been clustered in the order in which they are named in the Constitution.

In charge of each desk was a senior IEBC employee, overseen by a commissioner.

After verifying the results, the team would then prepare a section of Form 34C, which contains all the results as obtained from Forms 34B.

CHANGES

The team would also note any discrepancies.

“We don’t expect them to change the results,” said Mr Chiloba.

Following the ruling by the Court of Appeal, the chairman of the IEBC cannot make any changes to the results received from the constituency returning officers as they are deemed final.

The final stage was the Validation Desk, where another team would scrutinise the document, confirm whether the collation has been done properly and then prepare a report for submission to the commissioners.

The commissioners would then scrutinise the report and then have the chairman make the official announcement, Mr Chiloba said in an interview on Wednesday night.