A US based Professor; an expert in election forensic analysis has said the August 8 polls had widespread but minor frauds which benefited both Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga.
Professor Walter Mebane of the University of Michigan was in the country on August 14 following invitation by an unknown NASA official.
He was to look into the election data.
And in his assessment at the time, he told New York Times: “It was unlike any data set I had ever seen. Every single indicator came up signaling anomalies. It’s a huge red flag that something weird is going on.”
However, in a change of mind, he recently said that electoral fraud was widespread throughout the country but its effect to increase the percentages of votes for both Uhuru and Raila was minimal.
“Election forensics analysis suggests that frauds may have been widespread throughout Kenya in the August 8 presidential election but that the magnitude of frauds was small. Only a few per cent of votes, at most, are likely to have been produced by frauds,” he writes in the draft paper on Anomalies and Frauds (?) in the Kenya 2017 Presidential Election.
He analyzed data from 40,818 polling stations posted on the IEBC website and matched it with the Kenya Gazette.
And in further findings, he notes “Kenya presents a very hard case for election forensics analysis. As will become clear, voting in Kenya is extremely polarized.”
“Every indicator of anomalies is triggered for the votes for Kenyatta or Odinga.”
“Such excesses may be interpreted as symptoms of excesses occurring due to coordination problems among agents manipulating votes, for example through vote buying,” he further states in his draft paper.
The forensic election analysis he conducted found no problems with Form 34Bs which have been contentious all along.
“Spike frauds are not generally more frequent in polling stations included in problematic Forms 34B than they are in polling stations that do not have problematic Forms 34B.”
He also observes that he found “18 times when Kenyatta is specified to benefit from any frauds and 11 times when Odinga is specified to benefit from any frauds.”
“The total number of votes due to incremental frauds across the counties, for which estimates could be produced, is 36,907 for Kenyatta and 25,093 for Odinga,” he writes.