The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s (IEBC’s) system may have been hacked, as the country turns to manual counting of votes due to the failure of the electronic system.
Deputy Chair Lilian Mahiri-Zaja admitted to the BBC the system may have been a victim of hacking, though the organisation does not know what has caused the technical outage.
Deputy chair of IEBC told me cannot rule out the theory their system was hacked. At the moment they simply don’t know. #Kenyadecides
— Gabriel Gatehouse (@ggatehouse) March 6, 2013
The revelation comes following a day of rumours the system had been hacked, with people noticing a difference of 400,000 was maintained at all times between presidential candidates Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga in terms of provisional vote counts on IEBC websites.
Kenya and the international community is waiting for the results of the polls, which are the first since the elections in 2007 which sparked extensive ethnic violence across the country.
The failure of the electronic system has caused substantial delays, with the IEBC asking regional returning officers to travel to the central vote counting station in Nairobi to deliver constituency results physically; and further having decided to count all votes manually in Nairobi.
In turn, the delays are prompting increasing tension in Kenya, where everyone is eager to see a peaceful election and transition to a new government without violence or allegations of misconduct in the polling process.
