Azimio La Umoja's cyber security expert, George Njoroge, explained why the Forms 34A posted on the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) portal were different from those at the polling stations.
Speaking during an interview on Spice FM on Tuesday, August 23, Njoroge poked holes in the format of the forms that IEBC put out on its portal for the public to access.
He argued that the photos of the forms, having been taken by a phone, should be in Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) format and not in Portable Document Format (PDF).
"Officials took pictures of the original forms at the polling station and which are usually in JPEG format, but forms on the IEBC portal was in PDF. At what point did it change?" Njoroge posed.
While admitting that the format may have been altered when the files were captured and uploaded on the IEBC system, Njoroge maintained that this change affected the authenticity of the document.
"The process of changing the file format will certainly change something. The challenge of the conversion is that in terms of forensic evidence, the new file cannot be said to be the original file," Njoroge explained.
Njoroge, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the East African Data Handlers (Kenya), noted that the forms lacked metadata, which he referred to as the DNA of the document.
Metadata includes the name of the document, the date and time it was created, the device in which it was created, and its original format.
The cyber security expert explained how the process of having forms pass through the IEBC system before being uploaded online allowed infiltration by hackers in the South Africa's maiden election in 1994.
"The public portal they had at the time was hacked and Nelson Mandela's vote was changed. What was being pitched at the time was that the votes were being processed by the server yet the votes were being migrated."
He opined that IEBC should have allowed all Kenyans to access the files sent to its server but it limited the access to particular users.
"What we should have is presentment in that what is received is what is being presented, and every different user will different rights to do different things," Njoroge noted.
