NAIROBI, Kenya, Sep 2 – Lawyers representing Raila Odinga in the Presidential Petition before the Supreme Court have protested the alleged failure by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to comply in giving access to servers that were critical during the August 9 General Election.
While making observations on the scrutiny order given by the seven-judge bench led by Martha Koome, Senior Counsel Philip Murgor said what they were given access to, was not the same with what was used to run the polls.
“Instead the server administrator projected the V sphere which is the virtual server application management system on the white board to demonstrate the access to the servers. The V sphere indicates that the virtual RTS server was created and modified on 31 of August 2022,” he said.
“In effect, no information from a server was provided to show what happened during the 2022 August General Election.”
He further indicated that four foreigners were able to access the IEBC servers including Jose Camargo who has controversially been mentioned several times by the petitioners
“Aliens accessed these server 180 times or thereabout, what a mess. I ask this court to take note of everything we have provided as far as the DCI has provided to us. Our election was conducted in Venezuela and Venezuelans decided who won Mr. Chebukati was just a mouthpiece,” he said.
However, the report by the Supreme Court Registrar who presided over the scrutiny exercise, indicated that out of the eight IEBC servers, the agents of both the petitioners and respondents were given access to 7.
IEBC cited security concerns for not giving access to the 8th server hosting forensically captured image of the server holding form 34C.
“Instead of giving a forensically imaged copy of the server IEBC allowed supervised access to their live server. Agents addressed all their queries by querying details from the server. IEBC committed to providing a forensic image of form 34C to the court for the parties to apply for access. On the 1st September 2022 the forensic image was availed to court,” a part of the report read.
In the consolidated petition before the Supreme Court led by that of Raila Odinga, petitioners are seeking to overturn President Elect William Ruto’s victory.
In his prayers, Odinga asked the court to nullify the August 9 presidential election results, accusing the Commission of rigging him out in favour of Ruto.
Odinga further submitted that Ruto had failed to attain the 50 percent plus one vote required by law, allegations the commission dismissed.
IEBC Chairperson Wafula Chebukati, on August 15, 2022, declared Ruto the President-Elect after garnering 7,176,141 (50.49 percent) votes against Odinga, who got 6,942,930 votes (48.85 percent).
The court will issue a verdict Monday.
