Election petitions must free IEBC from illegal capture

IEBC lawyers led by Wambua Kilonzo file a response to a Presidential petition at Supreme Court on August 27, 2022. [David Gichuru, Standard]

On Monday, August 24th 2022, Raila Odinga and Martha Karua led the Azimio team in submitting their presidential election petition. They were accompanied by a battalion of lawyers, politicians and supporters bitter with the August 15th announcement of the presidential election results.

A presidential petition is not new to Mr Odinga. The Kenya Kwanza team have been quick to brand the Azimio flag bearer a perennial loser but in this case, with the damning evidence and chain of events that preceded August 9 elections, an injustice has been meted out not just against Raila and his running mate Karua, but to all Kenyans.

Every time Raila has petitioned election results, it has resulted in judgements that improve our electoral process. It is imperative that we learn from history and identify where the ball was dropped yet again in delivering a free, fair, credible and verifiable election in 2022.

This being the second time Raila has petitioned against presidential election results in a process led by the same IEBC chairman, it begs the question, was Mr Wafula Chebukati complicit in the capture of IEBC?

Before we speak of the present, we must examine the 2017 elections. Anyone who read the KPMG and Carter Centre audit reports of the IEBC in the build up to the 2017 election could predict a weakened commission.

The audit included an inefficient voter removal process for deceased voters, voters with electoral offences and those of unsound mind. This alone contributed to more than 92,277 voters being erroneously included in the voter register.

The 2017 Carter Centre report highlighted key misgivings on the KIEMS system - in all aspects of biometric voter identification and registration, and transmission of results. Yet - even after a failed dry run of the KIEMS kit - the IEBC chairman failed to correct the issues. Failure to address the issues presented in the two reports resulted in a flawed election process that was consequently annulled by the Supreme Court.

Fast forward to June 2022, KPMG released another audit report featuring damning revelations that cast serious doubts about the impartiality of IEBC and their preparedness.

KPMG quoted the 2007 Kriegler Report that noted that without a credible, clean and verified register of voters, Kenyans would not get a credible election.

Some 15 years on, the IEBC is yet to clean up the voter register. But that was less horrible.

The KPMG report revealed anomalies in the 22.5 million raw database of registered voters presented for audit by the electoral commission. This included people who had registered more than once, voters with blank or duplicated IDs / passports and over 150,000 voter records with invalid documents when compared to statistics from the National Registration Bureau and the Department of Immigration Services. Additionally, then Deputy President William Ruto decried that one million voters from his stronghold were to be deleted. How did he know that exactly 1 million ineligible voter records were to be deleted?

IEBC failed to seal gaps in its voter registration system. Gaps were also found in provisioning and monitoring of privileged user accounts. Additionally, there were physical security gaps around warehouses where sensitive election materials were stored.

Kenyans hoped that the commission had learned from their past mistakes. But here we are again with persistent issues that have not been remedied by the commission.

After the process, Mr Chebukati acted unilaterally by announcing disputed presidential results, against four fellow commissioners. Since then, we have been engulfed by messages of 'accept and move on'. But for how long will the IEBC bungle presidential elections?

The writer is a communications specialist