Nairobi — The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has asked the Supreme court to throw out evidence by petitioner Okiya Omtatah on the vote turnout saying that he was misleading the court on how the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) technology system works.
IEBC counsel Mahaat Somane told the court that Omtatah’s evidence which claimed that 1,665,412 people voted between 5pm and 8.45pm on August 9 showed that he did not understand how the KIEMS kit worked and the evidence was faulty.
The activist explained that the spike in votes is not possible as most voters had cast their votes by close of the exercise at 5pm.
Somane stated that the streaming of 1.6 million voters way after the voting had closed was well in-line as some kits relayed numbers way later due to network delays.
“This is a faulty analysis and you really have to understand how the KIEMS kit works, if the KIEMS kit is not able to get the network it will keep the information for the next two hours and that is how the numbers change,” he said.
“The polling will close but some kits will be sending the numbers of how many people went through and that’s how we know the numbers the KIEMS transmitted,” he told the 7-judge bench.
Somane further poked holes into the petitioners evidence on grounds that the voter turnout was 64.6 percent and asserting that the court should ignore the defense as voter turnout have no correlation in determining the winner.
“There is this fascination by the petitioners on turnout, we don’t use turnout to determine the presidential election. We give turnout for transparency to know how many people passed through the kit,” he argued.
According to Omtatah, votes accredited to each of the four candidates are fictitious, do not add up and cannot count adding that figures in Form 34C are cooked.
Omtatah told the court that the results were worked backwards to achieve a desired outcome.
He said the conflicting figures for valid votes cast of 14,213,137 and 14,213,027 is evidence that the results were worked backwards to achieve a desired or predetermined outcome.
The activist said the election was not simple, accurate, verifiable, secure, accountable and transparent, because the Kiems kits did not provide for digital voting once a voter completes verification.
Ideally, he said, the kits should automatically allow a voter to cast their vote and the vote counting process was not done automatically after the completion of voting time to make the voting prompt, efficient, fast, and secure.