Leaked recording of IEBC official tells of hitches that marred poll

                         James Oswago            PHOTO: COURTESY

By KIPCHUMBA SOME

Kenya: An exclusive two-part investigation by KTN has cast fresh doubts over who actually won Kenya’s 2013 presidential election.

 The first part of the investigation aired on KTN last night, with the second part to be screened this evening.  KTN’s award winning investigative team of Mohammed Ali and John Allan Namu exclusively secured the recording by an ODM insider of a very senior election official casting  doubts on the integrity of the results transmitted by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), which he still serves.

KTN says IEBC Chief Executive Officer James Oswago denied that he is the election official who claims (in the recording) that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and President Uhuru Kenyatta’s party, The National Alliance (TNA), hacked into the cocmmission’s servers prior to IEBC transmitting the election results.

The claims are in a one-hour telephone recording with an ODM insider (“Mr X”) on the night of March 5, 2013 when the presidential results were being transmitted. The technology IEBC had deployed for the transmission failed on the Election Day.

The IEBC official claimed that an employee of the commission overseeing the results transmission was working for the NIS and TNA.

Below is part of the KTN transcript.

IEBC Official: So their strategy began at a very early stage… the other thing is that they also infiltrated this system we were using of electronic transmission.

Mr X: You mean they infiltrated the system to influence the whole thing in their favour?

IEBC Official: Yes, the only thing I don’t know and can’t understand is how the results can be so constant… in an election where the results are coming in randomly, you expect that one person would be leading and maybe the other catches up and they are overtaken again and so forth, isn’t it. It cannot be that everything is so constant especially in such a closely fought election. How can it be that results coming in from 32,400 stations, come in almost simultaneously and the performance is so regular…it is impossible, even if you use random theory of any other method, it can’t work.

Mr X: It can’t work, that is why we are also shocked.

IEBC official:  That is why I am convinced they infiltrated our system.

Mr X: So did they do that before or when you began?

IEBC Official: Must have been before. I am told they had their guy in there. It is possible. In fact, it is not just possible it is highly probable.

Mr X: It is highly what?

IEBC Official: Probable!

In the recording, the IEBC official says he suspects that the Green Book (the manual register used by IEBC on the Election Day) was different from the one it released to the public.

The KTN expose unearthed numerous cases of missing Forms 36A, which were used to announce the results in various tallying centres across the country.

The forms also had varying results from what was announced at the IEBC tallying centre in Bomas of Kenya. The IEBC official encourages ODM to challenge the results in the Supreme Court.

Mr X: So in summary, you are saying there is a problem… but you will still declare someone a winner so the only thing is for us is to go to the Supreme Court.

IEBC Official: No. I am saying that there are things, many things that were not done properly. One, when your guys came to the tallying centre, they were kicked out…

Mr X: You mean where you were doing the verification?

IEBC Official: Yes. You see how can you kick out someone who is simply observing what you are doing and not interfering with your work? You cannot do that, unless you can demonstrate that the person is interfering with the process, and that was not the case…Okay, the third one is this: when we produced our register, we were supposed to have 33,400(polling stations) but this was reduced to 32,000 and something. But in doing that we never told the country.

Mr X: You just did it internally?

IEBC Official: We just did it internally and that should not have been the case.

Mr X:  What did you say about the register?

IEBC Official:  That you cannot produce a register and then just because it has a problem, you publish a different one.

Mr X: So does this mean the register you published was not the real one?

IEBC Official: The register we used is not the one we published, which is why in some cases you have different numbers from what we have.

Mr X: So you are saying that this should not have happened but it is simply not in the public domain?

IEBC Official: Yes…and now just looking back, it is occurring to me that this confusion is because the register you guys (ODM) have is very different from what we are using.

In Thika town, our tally from all the forms 34 shows that Uhuru Kenyatta garnered 54,337 votes, while Raila Odinga got 11,207 votes.

In the Form 36A for the constituency, announced as the final result of the election, Uhuru Kenyatta had 71,358 votes, 17,021 votes more than our count from the Form 34’s.

In Alego Usonga, Siaya County, the variance is also quite wide. In our tally of the principal election document from that constituency, Form 34, Raila Odinga garnered 29,764 as opposed to Uhuru Kenyatta’s 42 votes.

But, in the Form 36 tally of results that were announced as final results at Bomas, Raila Odinga’s tally had grown to 66,380, a variance of 36,616 votes.

Publicly, IEBC said there were 33,400 polling stations, but by the end of the elections, this had shrunk to 31,025, according to the election official in the recording.

Oswago told KTN he listened to the recording but could not recognise the voice, because the person he is alleged to have been speaking to was so distorted.

IEBC commissioner Thomas Letangula also told KTN that the commission’s servers were not infiltrated.