How to get reliable election results in our poisoned political environment

What you need to know:

  • Since 2007, we have experimented with various strategies for building trust in our electoral systems. Ten years down the road, we are still talking about electoral justice.
  • It is likely that after the next election in 2022, we will still be talking about lack of trust and its subsequent child — electoral justice. We therefore need a paradigm shift by accepting that the Kenyan electoral body will never be trusted.
  • Blockchain technology seems to have been purposively designed to address the broken Kenyan electoral system that is unable to survive aggressive and sustained political pressure from the leading contenders.
  • The system is designed to spot a fraudulent transaction in the next cycle of the consensus, validation process and will trigger a self-healing activity that eventually drops the malicious entry as a part of a ‘dead’ Blockchain.

The question of who is the legally elected President of Kenya was resolved by the Supreme Court in the second presidential petition of 2017.

However, the planned “swearing in” of the “Peoples President” betrays a deep sense of unfinished business following last year’s deeply divisive and tribal politics that perennially descends upon Kenyans every five years.

At the heart of our tribal arithmetic that passes for our general elections is the fact that the leading contenders never trust the electoral body, for the simple reason that each of them tries to gain an upper hand in terms of being able to manipulate it.

This fight to control the electoral body is the genesis of the lack of trust and provides the fertile ground for either party to reject the results. The rejection may be accompanied by convincing reasons that are nevertheless very difficult to independently cross-check or verify.

Since 2007, we have experimented with various strategies for building trust in our electoral systems. Ten years down the road, we are still talking about electoral justice.

POISONED POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT

It is likely that after the next election in 2022, we will still be talking about lack of trust and its subsequent child — electoral justice. We therefore need a paradigm shift by accepting that the Kenyan electoral body will never be trusted.

We then need to work from the basis that the IEBC, irrespective of who sits as its chairman or on the commission or at the secretariat, will remain untrustworthy.

Given that premise, we can then seek a solution that will still give us accurate, verifiable and reliable results. Surprisingly, there is a solution that works precisely for such poisoned environments.

They are called trust-less systems, or better known by their technical term as Blockchain Technology systems.

Of course, Bitcoin comes to mind as one of the most successful Use-Cases or applications emerging from Blockchain technologies. At the heart of the Bitcoin system is the fact that, by default, no one is expected to trust the other, but everyone trusts the ‘Network’.

DIFFICULT TO COMPROMISE

The Bitcoin network runs seamlessly without any centralised trust system, since all participants subscribe to and execute the same piece of logic that is inherently difficult, if not impossible to compromise.

The participants in a Blockchain network do not put their trust in human beings or centralised authorities; instead they place their trust in the logic executing under a network of independent, peer-to-peer computing power.

Indeed the Blockchain network is designed from scratch to anticipate and withstand attacks from malicious human beings, hell-bent on compromising it.

In a way, this technology seems to have been purposively designed to address the broken Kenyan electoral system that is unable to survive aggressive and sustained political pressure from the leading contenders.

This technology can decentralise our electoral system and distribute the trust we place in people and technologically scatter it across different stakeholders that will include voters, political parties, the electoral body and the Judiciary.

DECENTRALISED SYSTEM

The stakeholders will run independent computer nodes that will participate in the voter validation process that works along the same principles as those used by the Bitcoin network validation nodes.

We have to explore ways of implementing a decentralised Blockchain-type electoral system in order to divert political pressure that will inevitably be directed at the electoral body by the competing political elites.

Such a decentralised system will have three important elements: the participants, their transactions and the validators.

Clearly, the participants in this case will be the voters. Straight from their voting ‘wallets’, Kenyans should be able to select their preferred candidates and post their choice as a voter transaction that would go onto the voters Blockchain.

But before this transaction is accepted onto the voter’s Blockchain it will have to be validated by ensuring, among other things, that the voter is registered, has not previously already voted and is indeed whoever he or she claims to be.

POLITICAL PRESSURE

Currently, this validation role is exclusively held by the electoral body and is the reason political parties haggle to indirectly control it. Through Blockchain technologies, the validation role will be decentralised and scattered across selected nodes, technically shielding the electoral body from undue political pressure.

Essentially, voters, political parties, the IEBC, the Judiciary and other key stakeholders willing to validate the voting transactions will simply be allowed to do so. They would set up a validation node that joins the voters Blockchain network and run the consensus-based, computer validation logic.

The beauty with this arrangement is that for fraud to take place, a majority of the validating nodes must agree to participate, validate and accept a fraudulent voting transaction — which is possible but highly unlikely.

It is unlikely that different stakeholders with varying interests running independent nodes will all agree to execute fraud.

FRAUD-RESISTANT SYSTEM

In any case, the system is designed to spot a fraudulent transaction in the next cycle of the consensus, validation process and will trigger a self-healing activity that eventually drops the malicious entry as a part of a ‘dead’ Blockchain.

Beyond being fraud-resistant, the system will provide ALL participants instantaneous access to the results, which can then be individually audited and verified.

This will put an end to the current situation where the IEBC remains accused of failing to publish certain aspects of the August 8 elections as ordered by the Supreme Court.

Let us all push for Blockchain technology-supported voting in 2022 and finally close the chapter of perennial fights over election results in Kenya.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @Jwalu