How Jubilee rigged the elections

The official election results as announced by KTN
before they were ordered to revise them.

Panic has gripped the Jubilee Coalition headed by Uhuru Kenyatta as details unravel on how the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission – IEBC, manipulated the 2013 Presidential Elections to hand him a win, now the subject of a Supreme Court petition.

Emerging details point to a shocking scheme hatched by circle of advisors and government functionaries within the intelligence and civil service way before the elections.

Analysts scrutinising documents ahead of the Supreme Court petition by the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy challenging the results, were struck by how technology was also used to aid Uhuru "defeat" Raila Odinga.

"Kenyans will remember that some curious things happened with regard to the so called provisional results that IEBC kept churning out”, says one of the lawyers handling the CORD petition. “It was a statistical impossibility. Between March 4 and March 7, Raila Odinga was consistently stuck at 43/44% while Uhuru stayed at 53%. Musalia was stuck at 2.8% while the margin between Uhuru and Raila remained at 600,000-700,000 votes. This was impossible, considering that results were coming in randomly from all over Kenya. Yet these figures remained consistent."

After a confusing Friday March 8 when IEBC postponed announcement of final constituency results till Saturday, a quick operation was put in place to force acceptance of the results, amidst anxiety by Kenyans that the voting process had been manipulated.

IEBC’s James Oswago reportedly called media houses late (12.30am) on Friday for a surprise final announcement of constituency results without indicating who had won. Throughout the week, IEBC had warned the media from declaring a winner. However, 30 minutes later, KTN and NTV got the "nod" to call the elections. From there on, things moved quickly. At 1.30am KTN ran a banner indicating Uhuru Kenyatta was the winner. Other stations were caught flat footed and followed suit. Kenyans would wake up on Saturday morning to all stations proclaiming "President Uhuru", more than 12 hours before Isaack Hassan finally made the announcement on Saturday afternoon.

Siasa Duni in this exclusive can now report stunning details of a rigging plot that would have passed undetected if all players had stuck to the script and the "tyranny of numbers" theory had not fallen flat on its face on March 4.

According to CORD insiders and several analysts who examined the IEBC voter register when it closed on Dec 18, over 1,500,000 extra "unexplained votes" have surfaced in Uhuru's presidential tally alone. Since, according to the IEBC, every voter was given 6 ballot papers, IEBC will be hard pressed to explain how this has come about. If these allegations are proven, then Uhuru’s final tally will render the 6,173,433 votes announced by the IEBC to 4,673, 433. This effectively means that Raila Odinga won the election hands down.

This well calculated scheme was based on three critical points, the most important being a first round win for Jubilee. "It was obviously clear to us that any run-off would result in an anti-Kikuyu vote in which only Kalenjins and Kikuyu’s would vote for Uhuru, while Raila takes off with the rest of the country", a Central Kenya Senator Elect was overheard over drinks at a popular Nairobi spot on the day the IEBC declared Uhuru President Elect. "Winning Round One was never an option. It had to happen."

Getting the numbers was an issue that had worried TNA strategists as early as one year before striking an alliance with William Ruto’s URP to form the Jubilee Coalition. Even if Ruto's Kalenjin backyard was convinced to vote for Uhuru, the numbers the Kalenjins brought in would still not be sufficient for an outright win. Though the "Tyranny of Numbers" propaganda was sold as a winning formula, insiders knew damn well that the truth held a completely different reality. The 50% was simply not available. The best Jubilee could hope for was to force a run-off, that even their researchers said they would lose.

The Tyranny Of Numbers was therefore the psychological component of the plan, put in place to prepare Kenyans for the massive rigging to unfold, as was the "Peace" campaign enterprise, says a member of the civil society. "It is Funny that the tyranny numbers theory perpetuated by Political Analyst Mutahi Ngunyi in February 2013 mentions the exact same figures Uhuru got in the final tally," says popular blogger Robert Alai.

Several contingency plans were now put in place to ensure the plan's success. One was to ensure that the Kikuyu and Kalenjin voter turn-out was no less than 95%, while hoping that CORD’s turn-out would remain at the traditional 65% to 70%. Like many assumptions made by Jubilee strategists, this plan was based on the assumption that CORD’s base would barely attain their traditional turnout.

The second critical factor was the use of technology to help add up numbers as the infamous Tyranny Of Numbers depended on factors largely outside of Jubilee’s control.

This plan was borrowed from Ghana’s December 2012 Presidential Elections. The election, which is now being contested in the Ghanian Supreme Court, was won by President John Mahama, who was announced to have secured 50.7% of votes, enough to avoid a run-off against NPP candidate Nana Akufo-Addo with 47.7%. Akuf-Addo has filed a petition with evidence that the vote was won by manipulating the electronic system.

In the Ghanian petition, it has been revealed that the company hired by the Ghanaian Election Commission to supply data services, SuperLock Technologies Ltd., also had a contract with the National Democratic Congress to supply the same services to the party, which included tallying. In the petition, NPP says it had found irregularities including cases of over voting and instances where people not registered by the biometric finger-printing system being able to vote.

According to the NPP and the other parties, the numbers announced by Ghana’s Electoral Commission did not correspond with actual votes recorded in the 275 constituencies. They allege tampering of numbers by the suppliers of IT services in favour of John Mahama. The Commission also reported that turnout was at an all time high of 81%.

In a dramatic incident during the elections, NPP stormed the electronic supplier's premises and claimed to have caught the company’s data personnel altering results before transmission to the National Tallying Centre

Similarly, the company that supplied IEBC with the electronic data and call centre services is called KenCall. This company, whose connections to IEBC were never made public, was charged with supplying call centre services and hosting the database, from where the polling station results were remitted to the IEBC. KenCall also has a contract with Uhuru Kenyatta’s TNA party to supply tallying services of results from polling stations.

"Results from Returning Officers at Polling Stations being transmitted electronically were first relayed to KenCall’s servers for onward transmission to Bomas", an IEBC official told Siasa Duni. "Imagine the same server was being used to tally results for TNA! This is where the electronic tampering of results took place as it was easy to access the same server which was serving both the IEBC and TNA and managed by the same supplier. When questions started being raised about the contradiction between figures announced at polling stations and the ones on IEBC screens at Bomas, the system mysteriously crashed!" The official says it is unclear when the company was hired by the IEBC and why the Commission ignored the conflict of interest.

Siasa Duni has discovered that like in the Ghanaian case, the plan to rig the Kenyan Presidential vote was 3 pronged:

• First, encourage the purchase of BVR kits by the IEBC. The technology was simply meant to hoodwink the public and was planned to crash, then Plan B was to be effected. Using unorthodox means that included bribing IEBC officials, the more experienced 4G Solutions -- which serves India with over 500 million voters -- was dismissed and Code Inc., given the tender to supply the kits. Code Inc., went into liquidation and was renamed Electoral Systems International, after the Fijian government exposed the company to be a branch of the Canadian Intelligence Organisation. Part of the system’s technology was supplied by a company linked to a Mr. Chirchir, former Commissioner at the IEBC.

• Secondly, as Ghana’s NPP claims in their petition, the ruling party used Super Lock Technologies Ltd to hack into the system and pre-determine a mathematical formula that adjusts figures as they come in for both candidates while keeping any other candidates at a predetermined constant to ensure they do not harm the intended outcome. (This possibly explains why Uhuru’s margins with Raila never changed even with random results coming from all over the country). Yet, even with this plan, Jubilee knew they would have to top up the numbers as the 50% + 1 still proved elusive with a week to the election.

• The strategy was the real plan - play with Kenyans’ minds by manipulating results and establishing a lead for Jubilee then crash the system and go manual. This was arranged by refusing to have a back-up server which would retain evidence of the manipulation. With only one server, a deliberate crash would be final and destroy evidence.

According to Maina Kiai, former chairman of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, the technology was a red herring. "This election was meant to be manual from start to finish, loopholes included" he writes in his Saturday Nation column. "A manual result is what would allow different results to be announced at the Constituency, County and at Bomas. All these electronic gadgets and equipment were meant to pull wool over our eyes."
Then came March 4.

While the scheme was to "minimally" add votes to the Tyranny Of Numbers to enable a Round One win, things went wrong on Election day as the electorate in key battle ground areas stunned Jubilee strategists with an anti Uhuru vote.

Luhyas expected to vote for Musalia up to 50% rebelled and voted for Raila almost to a man. The 30% of the Kamba vote expected from Kitui through Charity Ngilu failed to come through. Coast, where Jubilee were expecting a 50-50 share with CORD voted for Raila. CORD and Raila took off with 70% of the Kisii vote. In Kalenjin land, voter turnout fell below 70%. The Tyranny Of Numbers was becoming a miscarriage. With predictions by Jubilee statisticians collapsing on Election Day, the team, after consultations, had to quickly switch to Plan B.

"This plan was aided by the decision by the IEBC to keep open some polling stations well after 5pm, the official closing time" says an ODM Chief Agent who manned a County in Rift Valley. Plan B called for manual voting to improve the numbers. In Rift Valley, CORD agents were reportedly intimidated and some left the polling stations as die hard URP activists, some of whom manned the polling centres, now took over. "It was hard to control what they were doing after that. Some people were now being given 2-3 presidential ballots to get their target number. We had no idea who was voting and who wasn’t," adds the Agent.

As former Attorney General Amos Wako disclosed at a press conference last week, "It appears the IEBC had several registers as they did not even gazette any. We will be asking the Supreme Court to examine which register was being used and which one was valid."

It is an open secret that CORD’s petition will put IEBC to task to show an increase in voter registration after the registration ended on December 18, 2012. In some cases, the register grew by 35% in one constituency after reconciliation. On December 18, 2012, IEBC, declared via their twitter handle, @IEBCPage, that there were 14,337,399 registered voters. The Final Register indicates that there were 13,352,533 voters.

Ironically, after manipulating the register using technology, technology itself now became an obstacle to getting the right numbers to ensure a Round One win. The Voter Identification Kits, which required fingerprint identification of voters, could not be manipulated as "ghost" voters and double voters could not get in to vote -- they had to be physically present.

By 2.00pm, a crisis meeting was convened by Jubilee strategists on how to shore up numbers in Rift Valley. This is how the Finger Print Identification kit mysteriously stopped working and manual voting was introduced. The IEBC's electronic tallying system which was relaying fast results with a 53% lead for Uhuru four hours after 5.00pm, suddenly slowed down with just a million votes in. Then the "IEBC server" which in reality belonged to KenCall crashed, and the results slowed down to a trickle. By 11.00pm, IEBC announced to the press that announcement of provisional results had been halted and pushed to Tuesday.

Most IT experts agree that the amount of data remitted for the 33,000 polling stations in terms of text messages could not have crashed the system. "It is very little data. Safaricom, Airtel and Orange deal with almost 300 million text messages everyday. The data from polling stations was not that much," says a Safaricom employee on condition of anonymity. "What is puzzling is why, on such an important exercise, IEBC and KenCall did not install the standard back-up server which would have saved remitted results and revived the process."

The CORD team believes Isaack Hassan’s explanations were a cover-up and that the technology's "use" and "failure" were part of a wider strategy to rig the elections. The electronic system kept Uhuru and Raila at particular percentages to psychologically make Kenyans believe that Uhuru was winning and Raila was losing. However, since the figures at Bomas were not matching forms 34, 35 and 36, and Jubilee's "Tyranny Of Numbers" formula had failed, the electronic tallying system had to be done away with.

Maina Kiai is more brutal in his assessment, calling IEBC’s excuses hogwash. "First it was that the server crashed. Then, that one side of the disk was full and unable to accept results. Then that presiding officers were slow in transmitting. The maximum capacity required for data from 33,000 polling stations is just 2GB, less than what a regular mobile phone can take!"

With the case now made for manual voting, by Wednesday, Rift Valley turn-out was being reported at 90% while Central's had risen to 95%. Based on the Kriegler Report, these numbers were obviously inflated. However, more was required as Uhuru had dropped below 50% countrywide. So delays had to be created for Returning Officers to re-adjust figures.

The diversionary tactic kept Kenyans "patient" as Issack Hassan kept talking of delays caused by "verification" and "technological challenges" as he introduced the phrase "complex elections" which would be repeatedly used throughout the Bomas briefings.

With the announcement that manual voting would be used, the vote tallying took a completely different outlook as the initial 48 hours in which all provisional results were to be announced dragged into days and tallying began afresh. Questions about discrepancies by CORD officials resulted in IEBC throwing them out. A compliant media was threatened into silence and no criticism of the IEBC was to be entertained or aired.

The Bomas tallying centre was placed under heavy security as the once accessible Chairman of the IEBC now avoided all media questions regarding the process. "This is the most opaque electoral commission and ranks lower than even the late Kivuitu's Commission" said James Orengo, one of CORD’s lawyers. In the deliberate confusion that followed, strange results started flowing off the IBC press briefings. Among them, the following stand out:

• Wajir North had a 92% voter turn-out for an area that traditionally indicates 50-60%. In Wajir West, had the Final Register not been adjusted, 99.45% of Registered Voters would have voted. In Nyaki East in North Imenti with 12,000 registered voters, 15,300 are reported to have voted!

• In Kajiado South, the number of people who voted (42,276) is significantly higher than the people registered in December 2012 (41,040). The register was then adjusted to 46,218 to hide this blatant theft.

• In Sigor, the people who voted (19,704) is higher than the people registered in December 2012 (19,337). The register was again adjusted to 21,341 to conform.

"How does Turkana Central, with 25,970 voters as at December 18, 2012 end up with 34,486 voters after reconciliation? Where did 8,516 voters come from?" asks Dr. Makodingo, a political analyst on his twitter page.

Worse still, IEBC’s figures refuse to add up inspite of efforts to "correct errors". Valid votes (12,222,980) plus rejected votes (108,975) add up to 12,331,955 and not 12,338,667 as IEBC declared to the nation. "It is strange that 1,500,000 people only cast Presidential votes, and across the country, this number is reflected in joint votes cast for Senators, Governors, MPs, Women Reps or County Reps. It is an obvious case of manual ballot box stuffing and double voting for Uhuru" says Statistics analyst Dr. Makodingo.

All that CORD needs to do is prove that the 8,000 votes votes Uhuru received to add to his declared 50% are fraudulent. If that is achieved, the Supreme Court should order a fresh poll within 60 days. But the question remains: are we going to entrust the IEBC with another election? We may just have created for ourselves a Constitutional Crisis.