SM | POLITICS
country ' s 40,883 polling stations and the other from 290 constituencies. Representatives from rival parties were required to approve the forms before they were scanned and electronically transmitted to a national tallying center in Nairobi, where they were to be put online immediately so they could be crosschecked. But the electronic system, which had been overseen by Christopher Chege Msando, the election official who was killed, broke down. Therefore, only the results, not the forms, were sent to the national tallying center, often by text message.
International election observers were quick to praise the electoral body after the vote, saying there was no evidence that the votes had been tampered with at polling stations and that the paper forms would show clearly who had won. The observers assumed the forms would be easily verifiable and would be matched with figures texted to the tallying center by party officials. But when Mr. Kenyatta was initially declared the winner, just hours after voting ended, almost none of the forms from the polling stations were online, even though the electoral commission had had a week to receive scanned images of the results.
A couple of days later, the commission announced that about 10,000 forms were unaccounted for, sowing even more doubt and suspicion over its credibility.“ The scenario was similar to that of the Bermuda
Triangle, where no one knows how ships disappear,” said Pheroze Nowrojee, a lawyer representing Mr. Odinga and the National Super Alliance, the opposition umbrella group.
The electoral commission said it had presented the forms, a claim that was verified in a report by the registrar of the Supreme Court. However, that report found that a third of the forms had lacked security features like watermarks or serial numbers, which election observers saw as evidence that the forms were probably false.
Defending the integrity of the election, Wafula Chebukati, the chairman of the election commission, noted that the focus of the decision was on the transmission of the results, not on the voting or the counting of the ballots. He urged investigators to He urged investigators to prosecute“ any of our staff that may have been in violation of the Elections Offenses Act.”
Walter Mebane, a professor of statistics and political science at the University of Michigan who studies elections worldwide, volunteered to run the voting results through a computer model he developed to detect electoral fraud. Based on statistics only, and without knowledge of the intricacies of Kenyan politics, he and his team found patterns that showed widespread manipulation.“ It was unlike any data set I had ever seen,” he said.
20 | NOV. 2017