By Ndung’u Wainaina
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has begun mass voter registration. The exercise will take 30 days.
The audit firm KMPG did audit of registers of voters prior to 2022 general elections. According to the audit report, there is existence of duplicate records totaling 481,711 and voters said to have registered with identity cards which do not belong to them who totaled 226,143. A total of 246,465 records of deceased voters were also picked. Another 164,269 registration were linked to invalid registrations documents (IDs and Passports).
The report unearthed 14 mysterious Returning Officers (ROs) running the system. The report indicated that the mysterious Returning Officers were able to “transfer, delete, insert, trigger, truncate, and update the voters register at will,” and “one user, Postgress, had superuser access privileges.”
According to the report, KPMG also discovered that the 14 Returning Officers were not gazetted but had worked alongside 290 IEBC officers in charge of the constituencies in previous elections. The audit also revealed that the ‘digital’ ROs were backed by 513 generic accounts in the IDMS against 9 genuine accounts and had access to the voters’ register in the Integrated Database Management System (IDMS). The officers had the elevated privileges in IEBC IDMs to transfer, change voter particulars and deactivate deceased voters and the constituency.
KMPG report showed that the digital voters register had over 2 million mysterious voters.These voters registered using duplicate or fake documents while other people registered twice in previous elections. Auditors also found that during the cleaning of the voters’ register, new voters were re-registered mysteriously.
KPMG also noted that the IDMS database was not set up to delete inactive accounts after 90 days as required by IEBC policy, and this made it more uncomplicated for those who had left the IEBC to gain access to the system.
The total records within the Smartmatic register of voters that were provided to KPMG on May 5,2022 was 21,970 597, including all biographic and biometric details. Smartmatic undertook duplication of the 2,184,472 records against the 21,970,597 records to generate a fully deduplicated register containing 21,710,728 voters, which was given to KPMG on May 18,2022.
Irreducible minimums on 2027 General Election
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) must unconditionally and immediately cancel the opaque, secretive and trained contract extension to Smartmatic for election technology management. This scrupulous company has terrible credibility record across the world on electronic voting, voter registration, and results transmission
IEBC must without issue fresh tender for acquisition of Integrated election management technology. The procurement must meet the constitutional and procurement transparency threshold including involvement of all stakeholders. We will not accept any time buying tactics.
No voter biometrics registration should be done with the KIEMS kits provided by Smartmatic. Smartmatic has supplied the IEBC with critical election technology, including biometric voter registration systems, KIEMS kits for voter identification, and results transmission infrastructure. The kits and technology must be discarded and new kits be acquired afresh.
All voter registration must be polling stations based. Each polling station must have special code. Voters’ data safety and security per polling station must be guaranteed. The voters identification kits must be foolproof to deter any sharing of data.
IEBC must develop and provide a timebound roadmap and milestones on election preparedness. Each milestone must be specific on what ought have done and report on status.
Parliamentary Legal and Justice Committee must immediately summon IEBC to provide details of the election preparations, any electoral reforms needed, and governance structure of the Commission including it’s secretariat staff rrcruitment status
IEBC must ensure that as per the Constitution, the High Court and Court of Appeal, the final presidential election results shall be annnounced at Constituency by the returning officer after collating final polling stations results. There shall be no Bomas or other such centre to purport to announce presidential results.
IEBC must make regulations to give media full access to final results announced at both polling stations and Constituency tallying centre in realtime including giving them the right to project winners of those centres. This is in exercise of principles of participation, transparency and accountability
IEBC must gazette and disclose all polling stations with their special codes. Further, the Commission must give clear timelines for voters’ identification and voters’ registers public scrutiny per polling station.
A comprehensive registers of voters audit must done. In addition, the IEBC, National Civil Registration Bureau and Immigration services must work together to confirm the details of all registers voters and their valid documentation. All old voters’ registers must be transparently audited.
The process of electoral materials procurement must be made public and involve all stakeholders. Voting materials per polling station must each have a special code.
Finally, all documentation on proceedings, resolutions and meetings’ records of the Commission and it’s various committees on any matter touching on electoral and election management must be made public.
By Ndung’u Wainaina /Africa Council on Human Security
A well researched article