Safaricom has issued a statement distancing itself from the failed electronic vote relaying system, saying it provided a perfect system to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).
“Safaricom was one of several service providers contracted by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission “IEBC” to provide network connectivity for the electronic transmission of electoral results,” the company said in a statement.
There have been speculation on where the problems with the relay system originated from, with the IEBC not pinpointing the reasons for the failure, which led to the dumping of the electronic relay system in favour of the one. There have been rumours the systems was hacked.
Safaricom said: “The total number of mobile devices provisioned to be used by the IEBC polling staff to relay results on the Safaricom VPN were 32,000, this represents only 2% of the 1.5 million devices connected to our data network at any given time.
“The Safaricom mobile and virtual private network has remained robust with 100% uptime in all areas where coverage was to be provided.”
The firm also said it had made their systems accessible to the agents of the eight presidential candidates and that they are confident of the system.
It made it clear it had fulfilled its mandate as agreed by the IEBC and provided the 17,900 original manufacturer warranted handsets used for the transmission.
The company added: “Safaricom’s role was simply to provide connectivity between the mobile devices and the IEBC tallying centers. Safaricom did not and does not have any role in the technical design, management or specification of the servers, the mobile software application nor the graphic presentation of the results data used by the IEBC.”
