System to relay poll tally queried

By ISAAC ONGIRI iongiri@ke.nationmedia.com  ( email the author)

Posted  Monday, February 25  2013 at  21:15

In Summary

• IEBC says equipment achieved fair success in Sunday’s mock poll, but failed at visualisation.

SHARE THIS STORY

  

 0
inShare

Questions have been raised over the functionality of an ambitious electronic results transmission system acquired by the electoral commission, set to be officially tested on Tuesday.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) tested the system developed by a local IT firm, Next Technologies, on Sunday during a mock poll held in 1,450 wards.

Today, the commission has invited IT teams from various political parties to attend a testing session to familiarise themselves with the system set to be used to relay presidential results to the Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi.

IEBC chief executive James Oswago on Monday told the Nation that testing of the equipment achieved considerable success but failed at the visualisation stage after storing the data supplied from polling centres.

“Sunday when we had the transmission of results, there was something that didn’t work. We used a server of a lesser power than the one we thought we should use. We confirmed that all results were relayed to the server but it could not do visualisation,” Mr Oswago said.

However, he explained that a larger server had been relocated to the tallying centre for testing on Tuesday, adding that the commission was willing to make any form of improvement on the system as suggested by the political parties’ IT teams.

Mr Oswago said previous invitations to conduct tests were shelved to give the commission time to conduct internal audit of the system before exposing it externally.

Investigations by the Nation revealed that the technology, funded by UN Development Programme, had been developed for use in the 2007 elections but was rejected by the defunct Electoral Commission of Kenya.

“The technology was designed by a Kenyan company called Next Technologies. The fact that it is a local company is not a big issue. Remember Kenyans developed M-Pesa and it is working perfectly,” Mr Oswago said.

Sceptics have raised concerns over the commission’s delayed testing and the vulnerability of the system to viral attacks by political saboteurs.

“We hope that the IEBC system will work and work well. It will be sad if it doesn’t because everything that can be done to prevent rigging should be done,” said Prof Larry Gumbe, the ODM chief agent.

TNA chairman Johnson Sakaja said that the delay in demonstrating the transmission system had been a matter of concern and urged the IEBC to actualise it.

“The delay is not good because we are very close to elections. As TNA, we have set up a parallel tallying system to ensure that we get the results from all polling centres,” said Mr Sakaja.

The executive director of the International Centre for Policy and Conflict, Mr Ndung’u Wainana, warned of high political risks if the IEBC vote transmission system failed.