10 steps IEBC has taken as October poll draws nearer

The electoral commission now wants presiding officers allowed to open ballot boxes to retrieve and correct wrongly filled results forms without a court order.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) said this was one of the measures it was taking to ensure that the October 26 repeat presidential election was transparent and that errors were corrected fast.

If sealed ballot boxes, on arrival at the Constituency Tallying Centre, are found to have wrongly filled forms, a Polling Officer (PO) and the Returning Officer (RO) in charge of the constituency will open such boxes and correct them.

The two will do this in the presence of party, polling station and tallying centre agents, who will be required to sign certain forms as witnesses to the process. This will then be recorded in the RO incident record book.

Station agents

“In the presence of the RO, the Constituency Tallying Centre agents and polling station agents, the PO opens the ballot box and retrieves the required material, then seals it and records the new serial number in the polling station diary,” said IEBC Chief Executive Officer Ezra Chiloba.

Previously, a court order was required to open a sealed ballot box.

Listing 10 things to be done differently in the October 26 poll, IEBC speaks of various procedures that have been improved in line with the Supreme Court ruling that nullified the August 8 elections.

To avoid further nullification of results, IEBC has embarked on what it terms a standardised and harmonised training. 

“The training has focused on transparency, venerability and standardisation. The commission has introduced a check list of what needs to be done at the polling station,” said Mr Chiloba.

The training of electoral officials is tailored towards ensuring that procedures are followed to the letter to ensure that the process meets constitutional and legal standards of elections management.

The commission, led by chairman Wafula Chebukati, will also ensure unrestricted access to information to all authorised officials to increase transparency.

To achieve this, the commission will provide the names of co-ordinators of the 40,883 polling stations. These names will be given to all presidential candidates to avoid cases of ‘ungazetted polling stations’ that emerged in the last elections.

As far as electoral technology is concerned, ROs will have access to the Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (KIEMS) kits at the constituency level to enable them to check which station has sent in results and which ones have not.

“We shall provide satellite phones in all constituencies and polling stations that don’t have good network coverage,” said Chiloba.

And in case of total KIEMS kits failure, replacements will be ordered; if the replacements fail, the PO will call the RO who will then call the director of ICT to give authority to use the printed register to identify voters.

Each kit at the polling stations will use a Safaricom card as the primary network and another one as the secondary network.

The kits will also transmit the GPS co-ordinates so that if the PO moves from one polling station to another or to another area of network coverage, an explanation will be possible to avoid any issues of 'ungazetted polling stations'.

All ROs will project results as they key them in to increase transparency. All forms 34B will be printed out and given to agents for verification.

In addition, once the PO has filled a Form 34A, he or she will transmit the results on KIEMS, then physically bring Form 34A to the RO at the constituency level for collation of Form 34B.

Printed form

“Upon filling Form 34B, the RO will take all the physical forms 34A and printed forms 34B to the National Returning Officer at the National Tallying Centre,” read part of Chiloba’s 10-point agenda.

Yesterday, IEBC also issued new guidelines regarding transmission of election results in the election. 

The commission was categorical that owing to time constraints, it would not be possible to configure the kits to accommodate any changes on candidates.

However, it does not mean IEBC will not relay the results electronically. The only difference is that there will be no relay of provisional results, which usually come in the form of text data and then displayed on a screen. 

Since the law expects the commission to electronically transmit results in the prescribed form, it is expected that under the revised workflow, IEBC will seek to ensure that all forms 34A and 34B are electronically transmitted.

These forms will contain results for all candidates participating in the repeat election.

This does not mean the commission will use manual transmission, the guidelines show. Manual transmission will only come into force if the kits fail completely.

The IEBC chairman, as the presidential returning officer, will be the one to announce results from counties.

Mr Chebukati will then declare the presidential election results and deliver written notification to the Chief Justice and incumbent president.

The PO will count votes and tabulate results in Form 34A before announcing the final result. The PO will then ask candidates' agents to sign Form 34A as well before stamping all copies of the form with an IEBC PO stamp.

The PO will key in the election results from Form 34A into the KIEMS kit and verify the results in the kit against what is recorded in Form 34A.