IEBC is readier than it was in 2013, but faces new threats

What you need to know:

  • Compared with the 2013 elections, the agency has procured newer electronic voter identification (EVID) kits that are more sophisticated.
  • First they have shared the mandate to transmit results to three mobile providers, rather than one.
  • An operator that encounters problems can fall back on its competitor’s network infrastructure.

The electoral agency has been under intense pressure, particularly from opposition quarters, to a point where one may think that there is nothing positive to expect from them.

Nevertheless, the pressure has been positive because it has forced the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to raise the bar around electoral systems.

Whereas some latent weaknesses exist, we should highlight some of the improvements the IEBC has made, particularly with regard to the electronic systems that will be used to manage the elections.

Compared with the 2013 elections, the agency has procured newer electronic voter identification (EVID) kits that are more sophisticated. They have longer battery power, can easily be replaced in case of failure and have been integrated with the results transmission system (RTS).

This means that as voters get cleared to vote, the EVID kit will take a roll call and count each valid voter, so that this count can be compared with the final tallies from the votes counted at the ballot box. Any discrepancy will be flagged by the EVID kit before the results are transmitted. 

This is one advantage of having integrated the voter identification aspects with the results transmission system.

Presiding officers will therefore not be able to transmit results that exceed the number of voters electronically cleared to vote, which of course presumes no manual clearance of voters.

REMOTE LOCATIONS

In 2013, the results transmission system failed spectacularly. This time round, however, the IEBC has taken some measures to mitigate this. First, they have shared the mandate to transmit results to three mobile providers rather than one.

This means that Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya will have their demarcated zones of jurisdiction, from which they are responsible for results transmission. An operator that encounters problems can fall back on its competitor’s network infrastructure. 

The EVID kit has therefore been modified and installed with two SIM cards to facilitate this fall-back position.

Additionally, provision for satellite transmission, particularly for remote locations without GSM signals, has been factored in. This is exactly what  ‘digital’ rather than manual complementary systems are all about. 

However, even when mobile transmission of results is successful, the destination servers may present their own problems. In 2013, the IEBC server crashed within the first two hours of operation due to the high number of incoming results per second, transmitted from numerous polling stations.

This time around, the agency has procured better specification servers and gone a step further to set up a duplicate data centre in order to ensure real-time fail-over mechanisms are in place.

ABNORMALLY HIGH

But some may remember that in 2013, the number of spoilt votes displayed was abnormally high, coming a close third against the leading two candidates just before the total system failure.

This was due to a software bug in the tabulation programme. This is one area that has not been thoroughly interrogated from a public stakeholder perspective. 

It is also an area that is most vulnerable to both internal and external threats. The threats include compromising the tabulation logic so as to modify incoming results transmitted, before erroneously reporting tallied figures.  

Whereas this could be cross-checked and reviewed later against hard-copy Form 34s, it may be too late, since the damage may already have been done.

It will be difficult to explain to the public why such a change may arise, particularly in light of the recent court ruling that presidential results declared at the polling station are final.

The public may not appreciate that malware can compromise and change what was declared and transmitted at the polling station to something different from what is displayed provisionally on their tallying screens.

ENCRYPTED RESULTS

Since the law anticipates that any discrepancy must be settled in court, the IEBC must therefore put extra effort to protect against such malware attacks.

An even bigger threat would be a ransomware attack. Imagine watching the results trickle in and halfway through, you get a message that says all the results have been encrypted and locked up, until such a time when the IEBC pays the stated ransom in Bitcoin - to some anonymous Bitcoin address.

Most ransomware attackers never honour their promises. In other words, even if the IEBC paid up the ransom, the encrypted result data files would never be decrypted or made available. The IEBC presiding officers across the country would therefore be forced to retransmit their results afresh.

There have been tremendous steps on the part of the IEBC to improve their electronic systems, but the threat landscape has also changed. It is therefore too early to say whether we will have an event-free election.

The best strategy is for the IEBC to plan and prepare alternatives for the worst-case scenarios, even as they look forward to, and pray for, the best-case scenario.

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