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