Wednesday, June 26, 2013

IEBC ADMITS TECHNOLOGY FAILURE IN MARCH POLL

By Antony Gitonga NAIVASHA,KENYA:The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chair Isaac Hassan has now admitted that the last general election faced ‘serious technology failure’. Three months after the hotly contested elections, Hassan said that the elections faced serious challenges in the voter verification devices that failed on the Election Day. This forced them to use the print outs of voter registration noting that the electronic transmission also did not work as expected. "We won't pretend that all was well in the last elections but we did our best despite facing serious technology failures," he said. Despite the challenges, the electoral body chairman defended the elections terming them as free and fair. "Despite the challenges plus time and resource constrains, this did not affect the integrity of the elections as proved by the Supreme Court," he said. To this end, Hassan said that the commission would conduct a post-election evaluation to determine where positives and negatives were. He said that they would start with an internal meeting before engaging other stakeholders on the recently concluded exercise. "The evaluation has already started and we expect in six months to give the country a national report on the just concluded elections," he said.

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