The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission of Kenya (IEBC) says it will be fully dependant on Safaricom to relay reports from polling stations to tallying stations during the March 4 election.
The system was tested yesterday, with the IEBC saying the use of technology to transmit provisional results is because it wants to have a speedy reporting schedule and one that will be transparent.
“It really reduces the manual intervention,” said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore. “What we are doing is sending the provisional data.”
The team that is working on the system has mapped out all the polling stations where the results will come in.
Silvia Wairimu, the General Manager of Safaricom Business, said that once the results are confirmed by the presiding officers in all the polling stations, they will enter the results in an application set up by Safaricom in their devices before relaying the results.
Safaricom maintained that there will not be any tampering of the results at its centre.
“The data is not accessible to us,” Collymore said while in an interview with NTV. “It’s the same way when you send an SMS, we can’t read your SMS. But we transmit your SMS.”
Safaricom has given the commission a secured Virtual Private Network (VPN) to relay the provisional results.
The IEBC has made every effort to ensure that all Kenyans get information at the same time from websites or even the IEBC site.
Some of the confusion that marred the previous general elections was blamed on different provisional results that were relayed by different media houses, which the technology is expected to eliminate.
