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Lawyer Mahat Somane during the presidential petition at the Supreme Court, Nairobi on September 2, 2022. [David Gichuru, Standard]
IEBC lawyer Mahat Somane has denied that Venezuelan national Jose Camargo interfered with the August 9 General Election as alleged by Raila Odinga's lawyers Julie Soweto and Paul Mwangi.
Somane said that the name Jose Camargo which appeared on a form 34A from Gacharaigu Primary School polling station in Kangema Constituency, Murang'a County, was an overlay-meaning the image of the form 34A uploaded on the IEBC portal was taken on top of another document bearing Camargo's name.
"A presiding officer took an original form 34A...he had the QR register and he took a picture of it," Somane explained.
He said that Carmago was among the people working with Smartmatic International, the company contracted by IEBC to provide IT support and that numerous documents bear his name.
Somane produced the original form 34A for scrutiny, saying that one uploaded was just an overlay.
"The register of the QR code was printed by Smartmatic International was printed in the name of Jose Carmago," he added.
The lawyer further argued that the numbers on the uploaded form 34A and the ones on the form that he had produced in court were the same.
"The document relating to Jose Camargo has come from the QR register which is distributed to every polling station. The question that someone called Jose Camargo was interfering with the portal is actually not true. It's incorrect," he said.
He argued that there was no way any one could have tampered with the results since the form 34A uploaded on the portal and the physical form 34A bore the same contents.
On the issue raised about the forms from Mt. Elgon and Nyeri bearing the same serial number, Somane said that forms may have had the same serial number but the KIEMS kit had different IMEI numbers and IP addresses, had been assigned to different polling stations meaning they had different identifiers.
"We acknowledge that is an error originated relating to those two KIEMS but there are other identifiers that can identify those KIEMS are from our system," he said.
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