Economy

Polls officials ill-trained to use devices

results

IEBC commissioner Abdullahi Sharawe announces presidential results at the National Elections Centre at Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi March 7, 2013. Photo/Phoebe Okall

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has blamed the problems it had with the electronic voter transmission system on lack of proper training of its staff.

Electoral commission officials at all the 33,000 polling stations were required to relay the election results via mobile handsets installed with a special software application directly to the IEBC servers at the National Tallying Centre in Nairobi.

But IEBC chairman Issack Hassan said some of the officials had difficulties using the software on their handsets.

The training among other things was to cover how the officials could download the special software application and upload it in their handsets, and thereafter use the template to record the elections outcome and transmit the results.

Persistent hitches in the electronic voter transmission slowed down the announcement of the results, leading to complaints by the political parties and heightened public anxiety.

This forced the commission on Wednesday to abandon the electronic system and adopt manual vote tallying.

READ: IEBC now turns to manual vote tallying after glitch

“I think as a commission we have admitted there were challenges with the electronic voter transmission of results, it was a failure on part of the system we as a commission developed in-house, failure of configuration of the phones and lack of proper training of the staff who were supposed to use the phones,” said Mr Hassan.

The announcement by the IEBC came, after the leading mobile provider Safaricom absolved itself from the technical glitch, saying it had no role in the system’s design, management or specification of the servers, the mobile application nor the graphic presentation.

The IEBC chairman had initially blamed the slow transmission of results to congestion, at one time letting out that the servers did not have adequate capacity. However, this means that the inability of IEBC officials to use the devices could have been a major cause of the delay.

Safaricom chief executive Bob Collymore on Wednesday said that the mobile and virtual private network (VPN) had been robust with 100 per cent uptime in all areas where coverage was to be provided.

The mobile firm said that the traffic on the network set aside for IEBC did not exceed 3.5Mbps at any time compared to the 3,000Mbps traffic on its network at any given time.

The system failure has raised questions about government agencies’ preparedness to use information technology on a large scale and, especially in crucial exercises such the General Election.

Mr Hassan Thursday assured the country that despite the technical hitches, the official results of the presidential poll, which would be possibly announced Friday, will be fair and credible.

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