Some of the claims that the primary presidential election petitioners built their case on were refuted by a supervised examination of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s (IEBC) technology system.
The change in the file format of forms 34As when they were uploaded from the polling places concerned the information technology expert hired by Azimio La Umoja to oversee the electoral technology used by the political organisation.
The forms were initially put onto the KIEMS kit in JPEG format, but according to George Njoroge of the East Africa Data Handlers (EADH), they will eventually appear on the public portal as PDF.
He asserted that the original content contained in the forms might have been changed as a result of the forms’ changing format during transmission.
Njoroge came to the conclusion that by altering the file format, the contents of the forms had also been altered—to Azimio’s disadvantage.
“The original forms were taken in pictures at the polling centres creating a JPEG file. They were then transmitted to the IEBC portal. The file format available in the portal is PDF. At what point did we change the file from JPEG to a PDF… It means that at one point, the file was changed,” he said.
However, an expert attached to the elections management body stated that the KIEMS kits could directly change the format of the forms at the point of upload before they are transmitted to the servers and ultimately seen on the public portal.
During the scrutiny of the IEBC system as sanctioned by the Supreme Court, Martin Nyaga, an administrator to the commission’s database, said the KIEMS kits have with them an application that could scan the forms to PDF as opposed to the basic JPEG format, which Azimio holds should be on the public portal.
“KIEMS kit scans the form 34A into PDF, which is then transmitted to a storage server. At the storage server, the form is processed by an application to check for compliance with certain security features. If the pdf file has all the features, it is published on the public portal else, it is dropped,” said Nyaga in the report addressed to the Supreme Court after a scrutiny of the IEBC database.
Azimio placed a prayer to the apex court seeking to have an audit into the IEBC servers, which are claimed to have been infiltrated by unauthorised third parties.
The court yielded to the prayer, but the electoral agency would limit the parties’ access to the system.
The commission declined to avail agreements it entered with various companies contracted to deploy the technology to be used in the polls.
The agency could also not avail of the forensic image of the server bearing Form 34C on which the presidential results have been indicated.
The scrutiny was under the supervision of Anne Amadi, the Judiciary chief registrar; the report is slated for deliberation in the court on Friday, September 2.
