If there is one thing that the just-concluded presidential election petition in the Supreme Court established, it is that our faith in election technology is misplaced.
The 2022 hearing confirmed what was actually demonstrated by both the 2013 and 2017 Supreme Court challenges to the presidential election results.
It’s now patently clear that all these modern gizmos don’t make our elections any more efficient or secure from malfeasance, so the logical thing will be go back to our roots.
Since the shambolic presidential election of 2007, where the disputed outcome tore the country apart, we have come to rely on technology as the antidote to polls mischief.
South African judge Johann Kriegler, who led the Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence, found that it was impossible to tell who actually between President Mwai Kibaki and challenger Raila Odinga won the election. He, therefore, recommended that Kenya speedily adopt technology for management of future polls.
Kiems kit
That is how the Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (Kiems) kit, comprising biometric voter registration, electronic voter identification and electronic results transmission, came into being.
In adopting election technology, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) forgot a simple principle well known to all to techies— GIGA, or garbage in, garbage out. Technology is only as good as the competence and integrity of the user. If the fellows running the elections are crooked and hell-bent on subverting the process, they will do so.
If the election candidates have the means and capacity to infiltrate and corrupt the system, they will do so. And if some of them hire incompetent and dishonest dolts to run their election databases and also keep a lookout for any mischief, they have only themselves to blame when their independent vote counts fail, and when any challenges to the electoral outcome are based on pathetic lies.
The IEBC cannot be trusted to manage reliable election technology networks, and that is why, despite all our talk about elections technology, we can never go all the way and adopt electronic voting.
Manual
Our voting is manual, our vote counting is manual, our vote tallying is manual and even results transmission can only be described as semi-manual. The only electronic thing at the elections is voter identification, but that also requires manual back-up in case technology fails.
For the purposes of these disputed elections, in fact, the IEBC nabobs abandoned electronic transmission of results.
They decided that returning officers would only electronically transmit to the tallying centre images of the handwritten results forms from the 46,000-plus polling stations but not bother keying in the numbers that previously used to be transmitted at the same time.
What that means unless there was data that was secretly transmitted, without the knowledge of the candidates, media, observers and the general public, is that IEBC would have had to hire thousands of data entry clerks at the national tallying centre to key in the numbers streaming in.
It also means that officials at the constituency and county tallying centres would have to resort to the same laborious process of keying in and adding up the numbers by a manual process.
Did not trust itself
I suspect that IEBC decided to go backwards on the technology front because it did not trust itself, and the candidates did not trust them. The logical next step is to go the whole hog and borrow the very transparent electoral system pioneered by good old President Daniel arap Moi.
In 1986, the self-proclaimed ‘Professor of Politics’ rammed through changes in the electoral system to do away with the secret ballot and adopt ‘open-air’ democracy.
Although that was only for the Kanu nominations rather than the main general election, it was a game changer in those bad old single-party days, when whoever got the nod of the monolithic edifice had a direct pass to Parliament.
There was no presidential election in those days because only a very brave or very foolish person would throw his hat into the ring against the Kanu president and automatic candidate.
Dramatic consequences
The queuing method had dramatic, though unintended, consequences. Kenyans witnessed on a massive scale widespread open-air rigging, where those with shorter queues were declared the winners.
The people, for the first time, realised how brazenly corrupt the one-party system was, sowing the seeds for the multi-party campaign that finally triumphed over dictatorship.
If we want to remove Kenyans from stupor and ignite the next phase of the democratic revolution vital towards ensuring that wealthy crooks never again buy their way into power, queue voting, better known as ‘mlolongo’, is the way to go.
