The electoral commission, IEBC has laid down stringent measures to stop fraud in October 26 repeat polls.
All election officials will not be allowed to submit election results without accompanying them with proof of signed forms, Daily Nation reports.
Poll officials across 40, 883 polling centres and 290 constituencies, they will be required to send signed result forms to IEBC’s transmission system and not text messages like in the August 8 polls.
This is part of the terms IEBC has entered into with OT-Morpho, the IT provider for the repeat polls in the sh2. 4 billion deal.
IEBC seeks to seal all loopholes that led to nullification of the August 8 polls.
OT-Morpho has hired 4000 people to reconfigure the KIEMS kits and have said it will deploy one engineer per constituency during the repeat poll day.
Further, “a new function of results transmission system application will allow IEBC returning officers to upload the official Forms 34B filled, verified and signed by IEBC.”
In the agreement between IEBC and Ot-Morpho, presiding officers will transmit results to the constituency tallying centre and the national tallying centre which is something they could not do in the last polls.
In the reconfiguration of the KIEMS kits, transmission of both text and images will be made possible unlike in the August poll setting where only text would be transmitted.
“During the August 8th elections, the results transmission system application on the tablet allowed (officials) to send text results only after a first failed attempt. This option will be removed; only both text and image will be allowed,” states the French Security firm in the agreement.
Having the kits reconfigured in way they can transmit images augurs well for the IEBC.
However, in 11,155 polling stations the IEBC had mapped out for lacking 3G and 4G mobile phone network, will have to move to areas where there is network coverage so as to transmit the results and accompanying images.
The KIEMS systems will be programmed in a way they provide hourly updates from the 290 constituencies and this will be displayed on a portal.
These are some of the measures IEBC has taken to ensure forthcoming polls are free, fair and credible.
In addition, it has put emphasis on streamlining the transmission of results as it was dogged by myriad technological challenges that compounded Supreme Court’s decision to nullify August 8 polls.
By Pharis Kinyua. He’s an online Journalist and an author for Jamhuri News