New Election Laws and how Jubilee is planning to rig repeat elections
2013 Presidential Election was rigged. That we all know. There are studies based on exit polls that have been done to prove this point. However, the rigging in 2013 was not as massive as that of 2017, since the 2013 rigging was simply to ensure Uhuru Kenyatta passes the magical 50%+1 number. In 2017 however, they wanted to maintain such a wide lead that no court would logically overturn the win – if at all the loser would decide to challenge the win in the Supreme Court. That massive 2017 rigging was however done so haphazardly that the Supreme Court had no option but to annul the win – forcing the two leading contenders to go back to the ballot – but the second round of 2017 Presidential Election will be done under new election laws, laws that will ensure the 2013/2017 rigging mechanisms are protected.
In 2013, the rigging was done by first hacking the IEBC transmission system to show that Uhuru Kenyatta was leading and secondly to fail the system so that subsequent transmissions were done manually. The script played out successfully, and when the win was challenged in Supreme Court, the court upheld the win but acknowledged that it was important for the technology component of the electoral process to be more competent. In 2013, the court of was able to uphold Uhuru Kenyatta’s win mostly due to the fact that the technology components of the electoral process were nothing but Provisional Mechanisms – where the entire electoral process was still manual.
The electoral stakeholders led by CORD would thus take the route of electoral reforms to ensure that the technology components of the electoral process weren’t mere provisional processes whose end results would be considered provisional, but complementary processes whose end results were considered crucial for transparently relaying the actual results to the public and providing digitally stored results for future reference.
In 2017, Kenya would go into the elections with the new Election Laws in place, but IEBC would side step a number of the provisions especially failing to recognise the fact that the results transmitted through the technology platform were no longer provisional nor mere statistics but actual results that was expected to be exactly the same as results contained in manual forms 34A. This failure forced the Supreme Court to annul the 2017 Presidential Election and order for a repeat election within 60 days of the annulment, a repeat election that is now expected to take place on October 26th 2017.
But before we can take part in the October 26th 2017 Elections, Jubilee is working tirelessly to ensure that it uses its majority in Parliament to enact new election laws that will be used in the rerun election. The main change the new election laws intend to introduce is the watering down of the role of technology in Kenya’s elections. That technology in the elections should no longer serve as complementary mechanism but as provisional mechanism whose results will be deemed inconsequential in the declaration of winners.
The new election laws provide that the manual transmission of results in which a physical form is delivered to the Constituency Tallying Center then to the National Tallying Centre, a process that can take up to 6 days, is the official transmission channel, such that in the instance where the electronically transmitted results differ from the manually transmitted results, then the manually transmitted results rule.
It is however important to take note that it is very easy to change results contained in manual forms than it is to change the ones that are electronically transmitted. This is because electronically transmitted results become available to the public instantaneously, whereas manually transmitted results can be altered either in the same form or through the use of forged forms since it take hours/days to transmit them to tallying centres. The use of forged forms was demonstrated in the 2017 Presidential Petition.
It is almost certain that the election laws that Jubilee is pushing will go through, and will definitely be used in the rerun of the 2017 Presidential Election. The question now is, how many Jubilee legislatures will be rigged out using the same pro-rigging election laws both after the ongoing petitions are done and in 2022? They should ask Martha Karua.
