The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is now looking for technology companies to bid for the multi-billion upgrade of the elections' software and hardware, and also for the results transmission system (RTS).
IEBC has an election management system for managing nominations and another for the transmission of results from the polling centres to the tallying centres at the constituencies, the counties and to the national tallying centre in Nairobi.
The system also has a database that compiles the election data in near-real time so that it is easy for the voters to know who the winner is hours after the closing of polls.
"The main objective of the consultancy services is to upgrade and re-engineer the above systems and to provide support and maintenance for an initial period of three years, renewable subject to satisfactory performance," said the commission's chief executive Ezra Chiloba in the tender notice seen by The Standard.
The call for the "upgrade and re-engineering" of the whole system comes three years after the commission reported a bug in the database during the tallying of the 2013 elections. The bug made the system to multiply the rejected votes by a factor of eight, and the IEBC had to suspend it.
Yesterday, the IEBC also denied reports that the RTS collapsed in the by-elections for Ngobit (Laikipia East), West Uyoma (Rarieda, Siaya) and Lolmokwo/Ngechek (Chesumei, Nandi) wards, which were held on Friday.
The commission's Communications Manager Andrew Limo told The Standard that IEBC had to switch to an alternative plan – have the presiding officers move physically from polling stations to the tallying centres to relay results.
"There were challenges of network availability at the beginning attributed to other external factors. In order to avoid delays in the announcement of results, the presiding officers were asked to proceed to their respective tallying centres. We had three workaround solutions for RTS and so we invoked one of the workaround options to eventually effect 100 per cent transmission," said Limo.
In short, the IEBC did not ask Safaricom for the virtual private network as it has done before in the Malindi and Kericho by-elections, on which the RTS is deployed. In the past by-elections for constituencies, the transmission of results was uninterrupted and seamless. But Friday's poll was for Members of County Assembly, and the IEBC appears to have placed little importance on the place of technology.
The RTS consists of computer hardware, software and networks infrastructure for relaying of election results from the polling station to the 290 constituencies, 47 counties and one (1) national tallying centre. In the last elections, the IEBC tapped into the Safaricom mobile network, where it was given a secure Virtual Private Network for the transmission of results.
"The expected improvement will be effected for the 2017 General Election," said Limo.
IEBC also wants to set up a data centre and an alternative site for data recovery that will store information (a kind of a back-up) in the event of a crash on the main database.
The commission seeks to improve its local area network at Anniversary Towers and a wide area network to make it possible for the headquarters to connect with the constituency offices.
The Standard Group Plc is a
multi-media organization with investments in media platforms spanning newspaper
print operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services. The
Standard Group is recognized as a leading multi-media house in Kenya with a key
influence in matters of national and international interest.
join