IEBC lawyers have dismissed claims by petitioners that the electoral commission’s system was infiltrated and crucial data altered.
Lawyer Eric Gumbo while making his submissions before the Supreme Court on Thursday said claims that the IEBC technology infrastructure was hacked and some Forms 34A uploaded in favor of President-elect William Ruto are laughable.
The attorney challenged the petitioners to table any evidence to prove their claims, stating that all Forms 34A had security features and can be matched with physical ones delivered by Returning Officers to the national tallying centre.
“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 said.
He told the court that Form 34A has eight identified security features including watermarks and UV potential to avoid the manipulation of the original document.
The court heard that by the time Returning Officers delivered the physical forms to Bomas of Kenya, the image of the form had already been uploaded in the portal, adding that all agents were allowed 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 stated.
Gumbo further submitted that the use of technology in the elections by IEBC was 99 percent successful, saying that only 200 out of the over 46,000 KIEMS kits failed to work.
“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.
On the three Venezuelans arrested at JKIA two weeks before the election, the advocate told the court that the foreigners were employees of Smartmatic BV, the UK-based company contracted by IEBC to provide technology for the election.
