Honesty lacking in debate on how to conduct 2017 elections

So now we are being told that manual back-ups are necessary for the elections because the systems may be hacked by Al-Shabaab!

Wow. We have lots of information stored electronically, including tax information, passports, exam results, Ifmis and other sensitive material.

Al-Shabaab has never hacked these, which could damage us way more.

Imagine if KRA, Central Bank or Treasury were hacked.

We are being deliberately misled on the manual back-up for our elections.

The actual casting of the vote is expected to be manual, with each of us making the X for our favoured candidates.

It is the before and after that always give us problems.

The Kriegler Commission after the 2007 elections was emphatic that one of the major problems was in the registration of voters.

It recommended shifting to bio-metrics to weed out the millions of ghost voters on the roll, and to limit ballot stuffing.

Biometrics is crucial for registration and identification of voters.

Once thumbprints and faces are captured and electronically stored, it makes it extremely difficult to include votes from people who do not show up in person to cast their vote.

The “normal” ballot stuffing would thus be easy to detect if the system is properly configured and tested.

BETTER CHOICE
Incidentally, this is what is now used at the airports by immigration and made redundant the use of the departure and arrival cards.

As for backup, manual registers, which are always multiple (instead of ONE as constitutionally mandated), with lots of add-ons, are dangerous.

Electronic backups in portable hard drives and in the Cloud are better, as long as they are transparent.

We could also supply enough backup batteries that are sufficiently charged.

And in this day and age, solar power — which is available even in the remotest part of Kitui and northern Kenya — would be ideal.

This may seem incomprehensible for those of us over 30, but recall that today no modern business or organisation uses physical accounting books and ledgers.

These are now electronic and with sufficient backup stored in different locations.

The harder part is the transmission of results and tallying, which regrettably the Kriegler Commission did not delve into.

What we do know is that results announced on the ground change — and sometimes dramatically — on the journey to the Nairobi tallying centre, provoking tensions and anger.

Sometimes, the changes are small, when they add on votes to some candidates, and deduct from others, without changing the basic outcome from the ground.

BIASNESS

But these small add-ons have a devastating effect especially if the goal is to avoid a run-off!

So if the IEBC and the political players could agree that the results announced at the polling stations are final and captured electronically and visually and cannot be changed by the Nairobi tallying centre, we will have resolved some of the problems.

Each of us then can simply do the maths and find out how the candidates have performed.

There are some weaknesses in this idea.

First the recruitment of polling officials from presiding to returning officers is shrouded in mystery and opaqueness.

Yet these are the most critical people in the election process.

Second, most officials work in their home areas, where there is often a wave of support for particular candidates and it is the rare official who will not be swayed by local peer pressure and succumb to manipulating the counting and recording.

This is supposed to be cured by having agents of the candidates at the polling station, but I am yet to find an agent in these “hardcore” zones who is an honest arbiter.

This is why the late John Michuki illegally tried to send in plain clothed Administration Police officers to Nyanza and Western Kenya as Mwai Kibaki’s agents in 2007.

INAPPROPRIATE CHOICE
Posting election officials away from their home areas may do the trick.

Why not source election officials in Gikuyu dominated regions from Luo Nyanza and vice versa?

Or source officials in Rift Valley from Ukambani and vice versa?

Nevertheless, what is clear is that resorting to manual registers; a National Tallying Centre and physical transmission of results will make things worse.

We must think outside the box or 2017 will be one to regret.

Have a credible and Happy New Year.

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