Raila’s Lawyer Philip Murgor Says Ruto’s Victory was Electronically Decided Before Tallying and Verification of Votes

Lawyer Philip Murgor says president-elect William Ruto’s victory in the August 9th presidential election was decided way before tallying and verification of votes at Bomas of Kenya.

“My hypothesis from where I stand is, clearly a result for the 1st respondent (Ruto) was being arrived at way before the tally was in. Each time, work was being done to try and fit forms 34A and B into that result and through the confusion at the very end, the result is forced on Kenyans through a defective form 34C,” Murgor submitted.

Murgor, who is representing Azimio presidential candidate Raila Odinga in the presidential petition at the Supreme Court, told the court on Wednesday that the IEBC technology infrastructure was not secure, confidential and authentic.

“The technology deployed by IEBC for the conduct of the 2022 General Election completely failed the standards for a secure and transparent electronic voting system and thereby yielded aptly what has been described by my colleagues as non-verifiable, inaccurate and invalid results,” said Murgor.

“The technology was so inherently corrupted, manipulated and tainted that the results declared by Mr. Chebukati cannot be, in an objective case, said to be representative of the true will of the Kenyan people.”

While urging the seven-judge bench to nullify the election, the senior counsel argued that there is evidence of downloading and uploading of Forms 34As at the IEBC portal by known and unknown individuals.

“Several of them were super administrators. The super administrator is the power to even create and join servers to the system, join, delete and alter documents. Super administrator, in this case, is J.C.A Margo who occasionally uses different names was able to do all that. I honorably suggest that it shows that this election was controlled from everywhere except IEBC,” he added.

Citing a report by the DCI, the attorney further told the court that the three Venezuelan nationals arrested at JKIA two weeks before the election were able to access the IEBC servers and compromise the results.    

Murgor further submitted that the Form 34C which IEBC Chairperson Wafula Chebukati had was generated several times even before the tallying exercise was complete.

“At any time you see a download of Forms 34A in the CSV format which is editable. As of August 12th, 2022, 15:43:48hrs, Form 34C had already been generated. The results were hardly in, according to IEBC. What was the business of anyone at that time generating a Form 34C?” he posed.

The lawyer added that the same process went on and on until the results were announced on August 15th.

He named Chebukati’s personal assistant Dickson Kwanusu as one of the unauthorized people who gained access to the IEBC system.

“We in this court, if we hadn’t brought the logs, we would never have known that Mr Dickson Kwanusu had wide powers in this system, so whilst in this dispute we may not see the fingerprints of [Chebukati] in the ICT system, we see his palm, his much larger presence through the actions of his PA,” he said. 

“Kwanusu performed a purported verification process of Forms 34A 1,743 times. The same scrutiny reveals that at 8:28, one Abdi Dahir who was not gazetted and who is belatedly granted access and privileges to the system purportedly verified 659 Forms 34A.”