Of suspect opinion polls and a false image of an efficient IEBC

A resident of Huruma in Uasin Gishu County is being registered as a voter by Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission clerks at M.V Patel Memorial Hall February 18, 2017. IEBC should recruit competent persons of integrity at all levels. PHOTO | JARED NYATAYA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • I am not holding my breath that this IEBC will deliver credible, free and fair elections with the way it is operating.
  • It is the responsibility of the IEBC to recruit competent persons of integrity at all levels.

A recent poll undertaken by Infotrak, commissioned by an NGO calling itself International Development Network (IDN), suggested that Kenyans would readily accept the poll results from the IEBC this coming August.

It also claimed that IEBC has the overwhelming confidence of Kenyans to conduct free and fair elections.

We should be cautious about this poll.

First, IDN is shrouded in mystery. Its website is scanty, suggesting a hurried job to put it up, and it hides more than it reveals.

SUSPICIOUS NGO

It is impossible to know who is behind the NGO, and no documentation about the board, funding or staff.

Its “resource center” is downloads of the NGO Act and its accompanying rules!

Attempts to talk to the people supposedly representing IDN did not make things any clearer, as none would tell where their offices were, their website, their work or funding.

Nor would they agree to a meeting, insisting that communication be done only via email, which turned out to be a gmail address, rather than an institutional one.

IEBC'S CREDIBILITY
Something smells really fishy here, verging on being “fake news” meant to influence us with false information.

We clearly have not seen the end of that and we should all try to verify whatever is presented in the media.

And we have been here before. In the lead-up to the 2013 elections, the IEBC was polling as one of the top two institutions that Kenyans had confidence in, together with the Supreme Court, at the time led by Chief Justice Willy Mutunga.

But with all the shenanigans around procurement, gadget malfunctions, “server crashes” and a return to the discredited manual system for voter identification, tallying and transmission of results, the IEBC quickly lost its credibility.

The “chicken-gate” scandals involving the then chairman of the IEBC and the CEO further damaged the IEBC, even if the politicised Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission eventually “cleared” the chairman.

ELECTORAL MALPRACTICE
I am not holding my breath that this IEBC will deliver credible, free and fair elections with the way it is operating.

It blames the courts for its unpreparedness, but this is more than about competence.

Like 2013, there is an emerging sense of willfulness in the way it is making decisions, short-cutting steps that could mitigate some of the emerging worries.

Incredibly, many of the key staff members who were involved in the previous mangled elections are still in place!

I am baffled that despite the court ruling that declares results final in the polling stations, the IEBC has not yet announced plans to ensure that returning and presiding officers are not only recruited transparently, but are based outside their home areas, to reduce ballot stuffing, especially given that we will probably use the easy-to-manipulate manual identification.

Now more than ever, these officials on the ground will determine the veracity of the election.

RIGGING
Rigging of elections has three basic strands.

The first is ballot stuffing, which is done at the polling stations by all sides (which then effectively balances out); the second is the changes by returning officers of results from polling stations under the guise of tallying, verifying and confirming the votes; and the third and most significant, is the massaging of figures done at the National Tallying Centre in Nairobi.

Note that the Krieglar report refused to go into the rigging at the National Tallying Centre, claiming that the evidence of ballot stuffing from both sides was enough to conclude that the 2007 election was irretrievably flawed.

Privately, Judge Krieglar was afraid that investigating the tallying at the KICC would present a different result from that announced and he did not want to be held responsible for more tensions when different results emerged.

OFFICIALS WITH INTEGRITY
Second, the argument that the National Tallying Centre should be retained to “correct” anomalies from the ground is facile and disingenuous.

It falsely assumes that the commissioners and senior staff are the only ones competent and with integrity, and should be trusted with “rectifying” obvious mistakes like more votes than voters registered.

It is the responsibility of the IEBC to recruit competent persons of integrity at all levels, rather than hire people whose work would need “rectification”.

Every time there is “rectification”, we simply get more rigging.