Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission 'knew' voters register was faulty ahead of last elections

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) allowed the country go to the highly-contested polls, with full knowledge that it was using an incomplete and faulty voters’ register.

An internal audit of the March 2013, polls, leaked from the commissions’ offices shows that IEBC did not know the total number of voters.

The data indicates some registered voters were left out of the national voters’ roll, and there was more than one final register, which IEBC admits it did not ‘fully clean up’. IEBC admits that ‘data was lost’ when being transmitted to Nairobi, and they have neither managed to find out how it disappeared nor recovered the details they think is still stuck in some computers.

“Some Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kits crashed before data was fully backed up. Moreover, no data was recovered from the laptops that were sent to Safran Morpho in Nairobi,” the audit noted.

Besides, the commission failed to give voters enough time to verify the accuracy of the data provided. There is also a damning admission that IEBC staff were ‘negligent’ in doing their job; and that they messed up the data because some voters had finger-prints and photos which did not match their names, and other data captured electronically.

Slow process

“The accuracy of the register was further affected by the existence of multiple registers, and loss of data due to staff negligence,” reads the IEBC report dated July, 2014.

The commission also confesses that it had a lopsided contract with the suppliers of the biometric kits. The confession of  IEBC is that, if all the gaps in the register had been sealed, then, perhaps the long queues and the slow process witnessed on March 4, 2013, voting day, would not have been experienced. The release of the report comes at a time when more Kenyans are losing confidence in the electoral commission.

The latest poll by Ipsos Kenya Limited (formerly Ipsos Synovate) shows that only a third of Kenyans have faith in IEBC. Already, there is an opposition-led push to have the commissioners ‘sent home for mishandling the 2013 presidential polls’.

In the internal audit, IEBC admits that at least seven out of every ten polling stations had a late-start; and in the remaining ones, there was a delay of up to three hours. The commission also confesses that the presiding officers were poorly trained and that this cocktail of poor training, system failure, complex statutory forms and fatigue among the electoral officials might have that led to errors when the results were being tallied.

IEBC is worried that as the country inches toward the next General Election, a repeat of the 2013 fiasco is inevitable, unless the elections are staggered; or there is a full rehearsal to simulate the election date in August 2017.

The commission also explained the huge pending Bills – which the National Treasury has already dispatched Sh2 billion to help settle, was a result of management negligence, such that Nairobi planned the budget without input from the election coordinators in the field.

“Whereas directorates were fully involved in the budget formulation process, the field offices were not. The operational budgets also kept changing during implementation of activities,” the audit report said. The bulk of the pending Bills were as a result of legal fees, security, hire of transport, training of poll officials and publicity.

IEBC is also yet to take full charge of the BVR kits from their vendor, and, therefore, it does not have full access to the software capabilities. The commission thinks the contract was bad, because, it now has to spend millions in license fees any time it wants to register voters.

Stakeholders’ input

“This condition is both expensive, unsustainable and compromises the ownership of the solution; by extension, the independence of the commission to perform its function,” the audit noted. By law, IEBC is required to continuously register voters. The commission is mulling linking voter registration to the acquisition of national identity cards, so that when a person gets an ID, they also get to register as voters.

When contacted to authenticate the contents of the document, IEBC corporate Communications manager Tabitha Mutemi said there is no such report, just yet, because the process of compiling one was on-going.

“We are still compiling the report. We cannot have a post-election evaluation report before we get the input of stakeholders,” Mutemi told The Standard on Sunday.

She said there was a possibility that the document was a draft report. She even cited a report of the Institute of Education in Democracy, launched in June, which said the registration records were 99 per cent accurate.