The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) through its lawyer Eric Gumbo dismissed claims by petitioners that its system was hacked and crucial data altered.
While addressing the apex court, Lawyer Eric Gumbo said the allegations that the system was hacked and some of the Forms 34As uploaded in favor of President-Elect William Ruto is laughable.
Moreover, Gumbo asked the petitioners to present evidence proving their allegations.
He further maintained that all the forms had security features and can be matched with physical ones delivered by Returning Officers to the National Tallying center.
“The entire network through which election results are transmitted is secured with double firewalls… for somebody to intercept, they must have information on voter turnout of that day of every polling station,” Gumbo told the judges.
Additionally, the consolidated petition of Raila Odinga and eight others want the Supreme Court to nullify the presidential election results declared by IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati.
The petitioners’ claim that the results were manipulated in favor of the Deputy President.
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Lawyer Gumbo further informed the apex court that Form 34A has 8 identified security features including watermarks, UV potential to avoid the manipulation of the original document.
Likewise, Gumbo explained that by the time the Returning Officer returned the physical 34 As to the National Tallying center at Bomas of Kenya, the image had already been uploaded in the portal, and all agents were once again presented with an opportunity to verify the forms.
“Agents are like our spouses. You choose your own. You choose the one you trust and if you choose one that you don’t trust, then you can’t blame anyone, if you choose one who doesn’t understand why you assigned them that responsibility, then you can’t blame anyone,” Gumbo said.
Similarly, Gumbo submitted that the use of technology in the polls by IEBC was 99 per cent successful.
“If out of 46,000 KIEMS kits, only 200 do not work, would I say I have failed? The mathematical representation of this gives us (IEBC) more than 99% success rate. In our view that achieved the constitutional imperatives contemplated under Article 86,” he said.
Nevertheless, concerning the involvement of Venezuelans to hack the system, Gumbo explained that they were staff of Smartmatics company, the ICT firm retained by IEBC.
