Kenya’s opposition alliance NASA is working on a tallying system that is expected provide presidential vote results within eight hours after polling stations close.
By the time polls will be closing at 6pm, NASA could be having full results and only waiting for the IEBC to formally announce the winner as per the constitution. The IEBC has seven days to announce the winner.
Opposition boss Raila Odinga has on his side a group of IT experts, mostly from Ghana and Germany, to forge a secret ‘win-in-spite-of-rigging’ system and super-fast tally, as reported by the Star.
The team is being led by an IT guru who previously worked for the US space agency NASA and crafted the vote tallying system in the West African country, Ghana where the opposition won in December last year.
The system is reported to have a modern technology mechanism set to ensure no votes are changed
The tallying process is known only to a select few in the presidential secretariat. “We need secrecy on this issue,” a source told the local daily.
“The system is intelligent enough to know how many voters are registered in each polling station and if there is any attempt to inflate the figures the system will reject (them),” one foreign expert told the Star. Experts are already in Nairobi.
The IEBC had earlier objected NASA’s parallel tallying plans and centre, but has since accepted although they maintained that the law requires presidential announcements to be made by one entity and so NASA can not announce the winner.
In a strategic plan to curb what he calls perennial vote rigging, Raila and his team of IT gurus have developed an system that simultaneously will transmit results from polling centers to both constituency and national centers.
NASA plans collate results from all 41,000 polling stations.
The opposition is training agents from the 290 constituencies. The agents will send results to Nairobi immediately they are announced.
NASA is replicating what Ghana did with a similar system that saw opposition leader Nana Akufo-Addo beat President John Mahama in the last general elections in 2016.