Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Chairman Wafula Chebukati has made five tough demands to French technology firm OT- Morpho after signing a new contract on Thursday to manage results transmission in the October 26 presidential election.
While responding to a letter by the firm’s vice president and general manager, Africa and the Middle East, Olivier Charlanes, Mr Chebukati has demanded total compliance by the French firm stating that they were partly to blame for the annulment of presidential results early last month by the Supreme Court.
Mr Chebukati added the refusal to set a local backup system had landed them into problems when they could not fully comply with the Supreme Court orders to open up the servers for scrutiny.
“One of the easiest things to do is setting up ‘real-time master/slave database replication’. We already have the infrastructure in place,” he explains.
Secondly, the IEBC CEO directs the French firm to facilitate the dry-run of results transmission exercise in less than four days affirming that the Commission is the boss and will define the terms of engagement.
“Dry run is an essential confidence-building measure to assure our stakeholders on the integrity of our system. For example, it can be one kit per polling station per county live on television. Such an exercise well-co-ordinated can take less than two hours,” he argues.
Ms Charlanes had earlier indicated that due to limited time left to the date of polls, it was impossible to conduct a dry-run of results transmission as he had indicated to Nasa.
"Even though OT-Morpho was and remains willing to support such a dry-run, IEBC has to realise that conducting such an operation is hogging the RTS system for four days, so as to prepare, test, run and clean the system. In the current planning and considering the recent delays in receiving the SIM cards to start the KIEMS (Kenya Integrated Elections Management System) kits production as well as latest IEBC requirement, we fear we have no room any more for such an operation,” Ms Charlanes had stated in the letter.
Moreover, in a bid to avoid repeating the scenario where some 10,000 polling stations sent results without forms in August polls, Mr Chebukati insists OT-Morpho to enhance its data capacity to accommodate the bulk data.
“Please note that since OT-Morpho are the ones who receive the forms 34A first, they must make them public. Text results without forms, shall not be allowed in whatever circumstances,” he insists.
Fourthly, The IEBC CEO instructs that Ms Charlanes will have to stay longer after the elections so that they can provide assistance in a timely manner in the event an election petition is filed.
Finally, Mr Chebukati has directed the French firm to ensure they activate the technology in a way that is easy to install locally to avoid
