Electoral Fraud Benefited Both Uhuru and Raila, US Forensic Expert Says

A US electoral forensic expert now claims that a scrutiny of Kenya’s August 8th election found “widespread but minor frauds occurred”.

The American expert further reveals that his analysis showed that both President Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga benefited from the “fraud”.

Professor Walter Mebane, a University of Michigan scholar had been called in by an unnamed NASA official on August 14th to conduct an audit on the Kenyan election data.

Mebane is a specialist in the forensic analysis of elections around the world and had initially, claimed widespread manipulation of the Kenya’s nullified poll.

“It was unlike any data set I had ever seen,” he said. “Every single indicator came up signaling anomalies. It’s a huge red flag that something weird is going on,” he told the New York Times weeks ago.

However, Mebane appears to revisit his earlier position in a draft paper on Anomalies and Frauds (?) in the Kenya 2017 Presidential Election.

“Election forensics analysis suggests that frauds may have been widespread throughout Kenya in the August 8 presidential election but that the magnitude of frauds was small. Only a few per cent of votes, at most, are likely to have been produced by frauds,” he writes.

The professor qualifies his analysis by saying “Kenya presents a very hard case for election forensics analysis. As will become clear, voting in Kenya is extremely polarised”. He says this can “distort election forensics results”, especially when combined with strategic voting.

Mebane scrutinized data from 40,818 polling stations across the country, which he scraped from the IEBC website and matched with the Kenya Gazette.

His analysis found warning signs on the numbers for both Uhuru (Jubilee Party) and Raila (National Super Alliance).

“Every indicator of anomalies is triggered for the votes for Kenyatta or Odinga,” he says.

“Such excesses may be interpreted as symptoms of excesses occurring due to coordination problems among agents manipulating votes, for example through vote buying”, he says.

Kisumu, Migori, Tana River, Nyandarua and Lamu were the most problematic counties, his analysis show.

Mebane said President Uhuru garnered 444,102 votes from polling stations with “spikes” but that “this model asserts that proportions of votes for Kenyatta in these polling stations is excessive, not that all the votes in the polling stations are fraudulent.”

“Spike frauds are not generally more frequent in polling stations included in problematic Forms 34B than they are in polling stations that do not have problematic Forms 34B,” he states.

He found “18 times when Kenyatta is specified to benefit from any frauds and 11 times when Odinga is specified to benefit from any frauds”.

“The total number of votes due to incremental frauds across the counties, for which estimates could be produced, is 36,907 for Kenyatta and 25,093 for Odinga.”

Mebane, however, says the turnout figures look plausible across the country.

“Appearance of turnout not being manipulated persists when examined separately for each county,” he writes.