Kenya must prepare its electronic election systems now for 2017

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) recently launched its 2015-2017 Strategic Plan. Other than mentioning the weaknesses and electronic failures experienced during the last general election, the plan is very shallow on how the IEBC intends to avoid similar experiences in the forthcoming 2017 elections.

Whereas experience emerging from the ongoing IFMIS saga confirms that digitising does not necessarily cure against our endemic tendencies towards corruption, it still offers the best opportunity for audit trails that can subsequently trace and place mischief to the individuals concerned.

The details and rationale of the electronic components necessary to support a credible election were discussed much earlier here and here, but in a nutshell, there are only three processes that need to be streamlined: voter registration (BVR), voter identification (EVID) and results transmission (RTS).

The Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) enables IEBC to enter potential voters into their register using biological properties of the voter such as the fingerprints or iris. 

The Electronic Voter Identifier (EVID) is a gadget that will ensure that whoever turns up to vote is indeed the person registered earlier during the BVR process.

The Results Transmission System (RTS) is simply a secure mobile phone that returning officers use to text the results electronically to central servers in Nairobi that automatically sum up the results in real time.

Of course all these components failed spectacularly during the last general election, for reasons that, one can speculate, range from procurement to technical and political.

But that is water under the bridge.  The question Kenyans should be asking now is how digitally prepared we are for the coming 2017 election.  Will the electronic systems backfire like they did during the last general elections?

Contrary to common thinking, these questions should not be left to politicians because chances are high that they would prefer to have the electronic systems fail – and this preference seems shared by both sides of our political divide.

Indeed during the last general elections, representatives from the leading parties gave a clean bill of health to the electronic systems, despite observing significant failures during the test runs.

This implies that both sides of the political divide knew that the electronic system would collapse but preferred to leave it as a question of who could scramble and benefit the most under the expected circumstances.

Rather than relying on political insights for technical questions, IEBC should endeavour to engage independent professional IS-Auditors to scrutinise their electronic systems.  This should be done early enough and more regularly rather than three weeks to Election Day, as was the case last time.

Civil society must also raise its game and ensure that politicians do not frustrate the IEBC processes in Parliament.

Politicians can do so by limiting the IEBC budgets or ganging up to fight proposed legislation aimed at tightening and streamlining the electoral processes.

Kenyans in general, must also snap out of their politically-engineered tribal cocoons and demand better, reliable and credible elections.  

This is because tribal cover is never sufficient protection against post-election violence.  The best protection is a credible election, preferably supported by electronic processes.

Anything less is likely to spell disaster for the both the winners and the losers in the forthcoming 2017 elections.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya's Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter:@jwalu email: [email protected]