Following the recent general election a number of petitions have been filed against the declaration of Uhuru Kenyatta as Kenya’s fourth president, with a number of issues surrounding the technology used in the elections.
From the outset the BVR kits or e-books that were used to verify the authenticity of the voters failed in many centers, a problem blamed on many factors including the inability of staff to decode inbuilt security, bad battery management as well as forgotten passwords.
Questions have arisen on the e-poll books having lacked the G3 mobile connectivity systems to enable them connect to the provided mobile handsets, with queries over why the supplier could not support the kits from a regional centre.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) says the collapse of the electronic tallying process is a result of a database server query problem that resulted in a multiplication of rejected votes by eight.
The IEBC has refuted claims the system was hacked, with penetration security experts saying the hard coded intelligence network was impossible to intercept.
“The system is pretty solid from the outside, meaning that from an external assessment, it would take say a government agency to break in since it’s running on Safaricom’s Virtual Private Network. Now from an insider point of view, an attacker could have the advantage of seating within a trusted network (Safaricom or IEBC) and would be predisposed to perform injection attacks,” said Tyrus Kamau, a security expert.
The Supreme Court verdict on these problems might have to solely rely on the interpretation of experts testimonies.
With no major cases on technology having been executed before and many ICT experts feeling the law might be inadequate to deal with arising problems in the technology front, many are viewing the election petition as a major litmus test for the Kenyan judiciary.
