Miru Systems: Profile of the IEBC election technology supplier at the centre of controversy

IEBC Chairperson, Erastus Ethekon and commissions address a media briefing on the delimitation of electoral boundaries, at Anniversary Towers in Nairobi, on January 27, 2026

Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua’s claims that Miru systems, a South Korean election technology provider was a plot by President William Ruto’s ploy to rig next year’s general election has exposed the company’s past history.

It has emerged that Miru was involved in controversies and technical glitches in various countries where it supplied the electronic voting technology.

Speaking to the media on Wednesday ahead of his US trip, Gachagua accused IEBC Chairman Erastus Edung Ethkon and Vice Chairperson Fahima Araphat Abdallah of orchestrating a sham tender process to award the Integrated Election Management System (IEMS) contract to Miru.

The Miru firm has conducted elections in different countries across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including in the Republic of Iraq, The D.R. Congo, the Philippines, and Kyrgyzstan.

The firm describes its election technology as state-of-the-art and prides its technology to have been tested and proven having ‘demonstrated our capability to deliver robust and scalable solutions under any circumstance.’

“As we look to the future, MIRU SYSTEMS remains committed to advancing democracy through secure, verifiable, and user-friendly digital innovation. We reject a "one-size-fits-all" approach, instead providing electoral systems meticulously tailored to each nation's unique legal, cultural, and operational environment. This is made possible by our core competitiveness: the integrated in-house development of both hardware and software,” the company’s website reads.

However, the firm owned by Jeong Jin-bok, also rendered as Jinbok Chung has faced allegations of faulty technologies with imperfect and shaky records overseas in countries where it deployed its equipment.

Miru Systems supplied electronic voting infrastructure and devices for the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) 2018 and 2023 general elections, but the deployments faced significant logistical hurdles, soaring costs, and sharp criticism.

Reuters reported that voters across the country reported smudged, illegible cards that the government announced, one week before the election, that people could vote without them.

Problems with the cards and the electoral roll, along with a failure to count ballots from thousands of polling stations, severely undermined voter confidence in the democratic process, three election monitoring missions said in public declarations following the vote.

Election integrity campaigners demanded accountability, including for any shortcomings of Miru Systems' products, along with an audit of an election that, at an estimated $1.1 billion in public spending, cost more than Congo’s defense budget.

In a report based on the 2018 DRC election by Sentry, an anti-corruption watchdog, dubbed Electronic Voting Technology DRC: Security Vulnerabilities and Déjà Vu, experts found specific security vulnerabilities in prototype machines Miru sold to Congo.

The vulnerabilities included potential threats to ballot secrecy as well as results manipulation while noting that Iraq's current electoral dispute showed how glitches in unfamiliar technology could trigger contested election results.

“Electronic voting technology thus threatens electoral transparency as well as the overall credibility of Congo’s electoral process. During the 2015 elections in Buenos Aires, independent researchers and technical experts demonstrated how corrupt individuals could hack or manipulate electronic voting machines. They showed that private keys used to transfer polling station vote totals to a central counting server were publicly available online, exposing them to hackers who could potentially manipulate votes and election returns,” the report read.

The researchers also demonstrated how hackers could exploit additional vulnerabilities in the underlying source code to manipulate the data stored in embedded technology in order to cast multiple votes using a single ballot.

The report detailed that researchers analyzed publicly available images of Miru’s technology in the country and were struck by several apparent similarities between the “electronic single ballot” technology used in Argentina and Miru’s prototype machines in Congo.

That, as per independent researchers, the machines Miru tried to sell in Congo were repackaged equipment originally intended for Argentina, where similar machines faced pushback, and where the e-voting law ultimately failed to pass;

That the company’s technology was prone to hacking and threats to ballot secrecy, according to Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology chief technologist Joseph Lorenzo Hall.

Miru, however, fired back at that report, and an executive was quoted by The Washington Post as saying “security concerns raised are not real as the author of the paper seems to have taken facts only from pictures seen and published.”

Following widespread allegations against the firm, The South Korean government distanced itself from Miru Systems when the issue on the “cheating machines” during Congo’s election emerged.

In an email sent to AFP after the Sentry report, the South Korean embassy in Kinshasa spelt out what it called the government's "official position," expressing concern the contract could become embroiled in DRC's political crisis.

Use of the machines "could give the Congolese government a pretext for undesirable results related to the elections, notably a further delay in holding the elections," said the statement, in French.

This is not the first time Miru attempted to become an election software provider as they provided the technology in the Philippines.

In May last year, a report by the International Observer Mission (IOM) , a people-led, independent election observation initiative organized by the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) raised concerns over the transparency of the electronic voting process in the Philippines.

Observers noted that the current system’s design does not allow for independent audits or clear verification of votes cast, raising doubts about its reliability and vulnerability to manipulation.

One of the primary transparency concerns flagged by poll watchers involved the online voting system. According to election watchdogs, many voters who participated in online voting reported that they could not visibly verify the names of the candidates they voted for.

In August 2018, Reuters reported that Iraq’ commission ignored an anti-corruption body's warnings about the credibility of Miru’s electronic vote-counting machines used in parliamentary elections.

The devices procured by Iraq’s Independent High Elections Commission (IHEC), were at the heart of fraud allegations that led to a manual recount in some areas after the May 12 election.

Concerns about the election count center on discrepancies in the tallying of votes by the voting machines, mainly in the Kurdish province of Sulaimaniya and the ethnically-mixed province of Kirkuk, and suggestions that the devices were tampered with or hacked into to skew the result.

Iraq's Board of Supreme Audit (BSA) expressed reservations about the vote-counting system in a report it sent to the IHEC

“Hereby, we found that ignoring and not responding to the report's findings is considered a clear legal violation that contributed to the passage of the electronic vote counting devices despite its unsuitability and easiness of being tampered," the BSA said in the report.

The report also referred to a letter from the Iraqi embassy in South Korea saying Miru Systems had assembled but not manufactured the equipment sent to Baghdad, and suggesting the price tag should have been lower.