Kenya electoral body defies court order

Odinga is challenging the re-election this month of President Kenyatta

Kenya’s opposition says the country’s electoral commission has declined to give it access to its servers even after an order to do so from the Supreme Court.

The leader of the opposition coalition, Raila Odinga, is challenging the re-election this month of President Uhuru Kenyatta, arguing that 54 per cent of the vote he received is fraudulent.

Odinga’s spokesman Dennis Onyango said yesterday that its information technology experts had been denied “read only” access to the electoral commission servers and to the equipment that transmitted the results from polling centers to tallying stations.

Onyango said the electoral commission instead has only offered the opposition the printed logs from its servers.

Odinga says he believes hackers infiltrated the electoral commission servers and broadcast results in Kenyatta’s favour. Kenya’s main opposition party said the electoral authority failed to heed a court order allowing scrutiny of the body’s computer servers as it seeks to prove this month’s presidential election was rigged.

Members of the National Super Alliance waited at the Independent Electoral & Boundaries Commission’s offices until at least 3.30am on Tuesday morning to access the servers, coalition spokesman Dennis Onyango said by text message.

The authority has provided “less than 1 per cent” of what the court ordered the authority to allow the opposition to access, he said.

Hacking allegations

The alliance alleges that members of Kenya’s ruling Jubilee Party hacked the IEBC’s system to ensure Kenyatta won a second term in elections on August 8. The coalition wants access to the IEBC’s servers to scrutinise whether ballot tallies issued by polling stations differ from results disseminated by the electoral authority.

The Supreme Court ordered on Monday that the alliance submit a report on its scrutiny of the servers by 5pm yesterday.

Odinga has failed on three previous attempts to win the presidency in Kenya, the world’s largest shipper of black tea and a regional hub for companies including Google Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. A dispute over the outcome of a 2007 election triggered two months of violence.