NASA wins first hurdle to prove IEBC system hacking, generation of fake forms

NASA lawyers Amos Wako (Left) and Millie Odhiambo (Right) interacting. [Edward Kiplimo,Standard]

The Supreme Court (Monday) gave Raila Odinga an opportunity to prove that 14,000 defective forms representing over 7 million votes were used to deny him the presidency.

A unanimous decision by the seven judges to allow Mr Odinga and his running mate Kalonzo Musyoka to scrutinise election materials used during the presidential election marked the first victory for the National Super Alliance (NASA) in its quest to prove that the August 8 election was marked by massive irregularities.

Petitioner’s claims

“It has been the petitioners’ claim that during the presidential election, Forms 34A were not captured, stored and transmitted in the expected time frame. In that context, we order that the electoral commission shall supply for scrutiny copies of all Forms 34A and 34B forthwith,” ruled the judges.

The judges directed the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to provide original copies of Forms 34A and 34B obtained from polling stations and used to generate the final tally.

Auditing Forms 34A and 34B are at the heart of NASA’s claims on irregularities and inconsistencies during the presidential elections, with claims that IEBC altered the votes and used fake forms with no security features to declare President Uhuru Kenyatta the winner of the August 8 polls.

By further allowing NASA to bring in experts and reading devices to detect fake documents, a lot of focus will shift to the outcome of the scrutiny and whether it will prove claims that 11,000 fake forms were used to justify the 1,401,286 vote margin between Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga.

The judges, however, said priority will be given to 15,000 polling stations cited by NASA as the major areas where altering of Form 34A took place.

To have their orders effected, the judges directed the court’s registrar to supervise the scrutiny and have the report filed in court by 5pm today. The court will have two independent IT experts while each party will have two representatives.

In addition, the judges agreed to allow both Raila and Kenyatta’s teams a read-only access to IEBC servers and copy all the information they want.

Exclusive possession

The access will include information relating to number of servers in exclusive possession of IEBC, firewalls, operating systems, password policy, password matrix, system user types and levels of access.

The commission will provide certified copies of tests conducted on its election technology systems prior to and during the elections, specific location of each Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (KIEMS) kits used and those procured but not used during the elections.

The electoral agency had opposed the application citing the tight schedule the Supreme Court has.