BREAKING: IEBC to do away with live transmission of Presidential results
IEBC has just made a major announcement, there will be no live streaming of Presidential Results from the polling stations. Instead, the commission intends to collect results as announced by the returning officers at the 290 constituencies then announce the final results. This comes as the electoral body updates its streaming technology such that the periodic updates on the transmittance of the results will be discontinued.
After the botched 2007 elections, a commission headed by Judge Johann Kriegler to set up to find out why the elections were contentious. The findings of the commission, alongside other findings, was that the elections in Kenya were such that it was very easy for any candidate to rig the elections either at polling stations through ballot stuffing, or alter the results during transmission or tallying. To help seal these loopholes, Kriegler recommended a technological set up through which results could be transmitted live from all polling stations across the country, so that everyone could monitor the progress of the tallying.
In 2013, the results transmission technology would terribly fail, a situation IEBC blamed on hackers. In the forthcoming elections, the IEBC assured Kenyans that the technologies in place are tamper proof and are not expected to fail. However, the changes IEBC has announced in the means that the electoral body is not interested in transmitting the live results.
The @IEBCKenya is trying to make the system to fail even before the election, not good for the country
— Kachwanya (@kachwanya) July 25, 2017
Now it make sense why @IEBCKenya ,CA & Jubilee have been against tallying centers,stay in the dark then iebc come to tell you their figures
— Kachwanya (@kachwanya) July 25, 2017
It is important to point out that if the transmission technology does not work, and Kenyans are left at the mercy of IEBC without being able to monitor the results as they happen in real time, then the grounds for trusting the IEBC will be very flimsy. The inability to monitor the results in real time also negates the constitutional provisions that provides for a simple, free, fair, TRANSPARENT, and verifiable elections.
