Experts: 2013, 2017 voter registers failed integrity test

The voters register in 2013 and 2017 had multiple errors, which compromised integrity of the electoral process and outcome of the polls, experts have revealed.

Constitutional lawyer and governance expert Wachira Maina said as part of the 2016 electoral reforms, audit firm KPMG was hired to do an assessment of the registration of voters, which was carried out in May 2017 but was too late to be used in that year’s elections.

According to Maina, the audit found the register in 2017 was in a worse state than previously thought.

“It was a catalogue of deliberate and inadvertent failures, illegalities, irregularities and just bad corporate governance.

The audit revealed serious errors in the way the register was compiled: from the initial data capture and its updating at the constituency level to its consolidation at the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) headquarters,” said the lawyer.

Maina was making a presentation during the National Dialogue Conference on Electoral Justice in Kenya yesterday, that brought together key stakeholders including political and religious leaders, civil society and human rights organisations, the Registrar of Political Parties and the media.

“Elections cannot have integrity if we do not  know who is voting and we cannot know who is voting if the register is – like ours – hopelessly compromised. In 2013, the register had numerous additions and deletions,” said the lawyer.

According to the KPMG report, IEBC did not have a “centralised Biometric Voter Registration (BVR) kit records showing the serial numbers by location”.

The serial numbers of many BVR kits were not embedded into the BVR system, which made it difficult to authenticate and easy to plug in rogue kits.

The report further showed that there was inadequate authentication and testing and insufficient auditability, connections between head office and regions lacked redundancy, returning officers were not mapped onto their constituencies and a third of Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) gadgets availed for use in case of power failure were not working.

In the KPMG report, some 13,790 voters were deleted in Coast and Nyanza, 50,102 were subtracted in Nairobi, 2,938 were removed in Western Kenya while in Central Rift Valley, 68,836 voters were added to the voter register and 4,222 voters were also added in Eastern.

KPMG found that there was a large number of voters without valid identification documents with some 171,476 voters’ records without matching Identity Cards.

Numerous additions

The report also showed that some 17,523 voters’ records did not have matching passport numbers and that the audit unearthed 93,548 duplicated ID and passport numbers, which created 197,677 records.

The report further showed that 1,656 identity records were duplicated three times, 502 were duplicated four times, 361 five times, 289 six times, 261 seven times, 176 had been duplicated eight times, 123 nine times, and 59 ten times. According to the KPMG report, 92,277 dead people were on the register with matching IDs and names.

“The audit estimated that between 2012-2017 there was potential for an additional 1,037,260 dead voters on the register,” said Maina.

KPMG noted that invalid identification document numbers that do not conform to the standard formats were adopted by the relevant State agencies.

For example, according to the National Registration Bureau (NRB), valid ID numbers should comprise eight numeric characters or less, but the IEBC voters register had 60,853 ID numbers that did not have eight numeric characters.

“BVR kit name changes were not restricted – changes could be made to add new kits at any time. IEBC staff who had long left the agency still had logins,” the lawyer observed.

The report also found that unauthorised data sources – both external and internal to IEBC – could be configured to transmit data to the IEBC database, which would allow an unauthorised person – inside and outside IEBC – to add, amend or delete the voters’ records.

“The settings within the database can permit an administrator to ‘clone another user’s access rights’. This ability gives administrator accounts “excess privileges”, the report said.

This means an administrator can clone another user’s access rights, make unauthorised changes to the register and having done so revert to their own privileges, thereby concealing the irregular and unauthorised access.

Maina also poked holes in the manner in which various political parties carried out their nominations.