If you wanted to steal the 2017 election, this is how
What you need to know:
- I, too, am therefore also going through my share of the five difficult stages of grief.
- Instead work forward from the ballot boxes, essentially ballot stuffing reloaded.
After a contentious, gruelling three-month campaign leading to the elections, Kenyans have voted and IEBC has declared Uhuru Kenyatta the winner.
As expected, close to fifty per cent of the population that voted for the Nasa dream to Canaan are going through five difficult stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
At the risk of losing more than half of my readership, it is good journalistic practice to disclose what probably most of you already knew; that I was solidly behind the dream to Canaan before I was suddenly woken up when the results started trickling late in the night of August 8, 2017.
I, too, am therefore also going through my share of the five difficult stages of grief as I seek to answer - from a technical perspective - the one million-dollar question: were the 2017 presidential elections stolen?
PETITION
The simple answer is we do not and shall never know unless someone launches a petition in the Supreme Court, which will then interrogate the evidence, separate rumours from facts and authoritatively tell us the answer.
“Once bitten, twice shy” is perhaps the reason why the opposition may not be comfortable going back to a court that so casually dismissed their 2013 petition in a ruling that was read in less than five minutes.
Yet, unless the evidence is brought up for judicial review, any contenting view that a party strongly holds onto will remain a view until such a time that it is affirmed one way or the other by a court of law.
So back to the question – were the 2017 elections stolen? The safest answer is still that we do not know.
VOTERS
However, I have a personal view from a technical perspective on how elections can be stolen, even when the majority of the technical systems are working perfectly as they did this time around.
The regular readers will realise that this view is not new, having been published a week before the election. Essentially, if either of the leading sides needed to steal these elections, they would do it through the complimentary or manual system of identifying voters.
Of course, one could also steal the the election by electronically manipulating and beefing up the final tallies, but such an approach is relatively easy to quash in court and would therefore not be preferred.
This is because even if one succeeds in hacking the IEBC system and upgrading electronic tallies in a given polling station, one would still need to find a way to add physical ballot papers into sealed boxes in order to maintain a match.
HACKED
A simple court order to recount ballot papers and compare the ballot figures against the hacked electronic figures would easily reveal the fraud and automatically lead to nullification of the election results.
Seasoned politicians with any knowledge of rigging are therefore unlikely to use this hacking approach, however cutting-edge it sounds in terms of technical jargon and buzzwords.
In any case, why hack a system when you have the option to use a simpler fool-proof method known as the complementary system?
In this simple approach, you locate polling stations in your strongholds where there are no agents from the other party. Where necessary, you buy off the opposition’s agents so they take an early day off.
DEAD VOTERS
Then, armed with a bunch of National IDs of absentee or dead voters, you proceed to clear them through the electronic voter ID kit and subsequently vote on their behalf. Next you tally the results, sign the now famous Form34As and electronically file your returns.
The figures hitting the IEBC servers will perfectly match with Form34As and the actual physical ballots in the box. No need to work backwards from some hacked figures.
Instead work forward from the ballot boxes, essentially ballot stuffing reloaded.
I was privileged enough to share this view with a certain John Kerry, one of the prominent leaders of the foreign observer mission. He politely reminded me that IEBC cannot be blamed if your agents are absent from the polling station for one reason or the other.
Further, whereas this rigging approach is possible, it is not necessarily the same as what actually happened, since the burden of proof lies on the petitioner to collate and present the evidence for the courts to interrogate and adjudicate.
It’s a nasty world out there and in the words of a friend of mine – if you snooze, you lose. But who knows, there could be some petitions on the way that would allow Kenyans to get to the bottom of these suspicions.
