A former Jubilee party senatorial candidate has moved to court seeking to bar IEBC from using the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) in the October 26 presidential poll.
Dr John Mukhwana filed the suit against the Attorney General at the High Court in Nairobi on Wednesday.
The Bungoma politician argues that the ordinary voter is hardly computer literate to understand the intricacies of using the electronic system.
Through his lawyer, Kioko Kilukumi, the Jubilee politician tells the court that Wanjiku lacks knowledge of terms such as electronically operating systems, logs, servers, firewalls, clouds and read-only access.
[caption caption="Former Bungoma senatorial candidate Dr John Mukhwana"]
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The court papers filed against the electoral body further allege that the ICT system lacks simplicity, accuracy, verifiability, security, accountability and transparency yet elections are public in nature.
"An election procedure in which the voter cannot reliably comprehend whether his or her vote is transmitted without falsification and is included in the ascertainment of the election result excludes central elements of the election procedure from public monitoring," lawyer Kilukumi told the court.
He further argued that the election system should allow the voter to countercheck each step in the process without advanced knowledge on the subject.
"It is through democratic elections that the people exercise their sovereign power to democratically elect representatives, to whom they delegate their sovereign power exercisable in accordance with the Constitution," Mr Kilukumi asserted.
The petitioner has likewise reiterated sentiments that coloured the Supreme Court hearings of the NASA election suit, stating that the KIEMS kits are vulnerable to external interference.
"Electronic transmission of results is susceptible to manipulation with relatively little effort from techno-savvy individuals and this could consist providing a preset percentage in the final result for a specific candidate prior to the commencement of the elections without this coming to light," the court papers suggested.
[caption caption="An IEBC official displays a KIEMS kit"]
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Dr Mukhwana, in particular, wants the sections of the Election Act that require IEBC to electronically transmit presidential election results from polling stations to the constituency tallying centre and finally to the national tallying centre declared unconstitutional.
The Jubilee candidate lost his bid for Bungoma senator to NASA leader Moses Wetangula.
