Thursday, March 21, 2013

details unravel on how the 2013 Presidential Elections were manipulated

-----Original message------
From: Ammbbaassaah Odhiambo <dejuols@gmail.com>
To: <dynamics@mail.com>,"National Youth Sector Alliance" <nysa.kenya@gmail.com>,"nysa1" <nysa1@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 6:36:52 PM GMT+0300
Subject: [NYSA:9913] details unravel on how the 2013 Presidential Elections were manipulated

Panic has gripped the Jubilee Coalition headed by Uhuru Kenyatta as details
unravel on how the 2013 Presidential Elections were manipulated to hand him
a win by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission – IEBC, that
is now the subject of a Supreme Court petition.

The emerging details point to a shocking scheme hatched by circle of
advisors and government functionaries within the intelligence and civil
service, way before the elections.

Analysts scrutinizing documents ahead of the Supreme Court petition by the
Coalition for Reforms and Democracy challenging the results, were stuck by
how technology was also used to aid Uhuru "defeat" Raila Odinga of CORD.

"Kenyans can remember well that some curious things happened with regard to
the so called provisional results that IEBC kept churning out", says one of
the lawyers handling the CORD petition.

"It was a statistical impossibility. Between March 4th – March 7th, Raila
Odinga was consistently stuck at 43/44% while Uhuru stayed at 53%. Musalia
was stuck at 2.8% while the margin between Uhuru and Raila remained at
600,000-700,000 votes. This was impossible considering that results were
coming in randomly from all over Kenya. Yet these figures remained
consistent".

After a confusing Friday 8th March when IEBC postponed announcement of
final constituency results till Saturday, a quick operation was put in
place to force acceptance of the results, amidst anxiety by Kenyans that
the voting process had been manipulated.

IEBC's James Oswago reportedly called media houses late in the night for a
surprise final announcement of constituency results Friday 12.30am without
indicating who had won. Throughout the week IEBC had warned media from
declaring anyone the winner. However 30 minutes later KTN and NTV got a
"nod" to call the elections. From there on events moved quickly. At 1.30am
KTN flew a banner indicating Uhuru Kenyatta was the winner. Several
stations in surprise followed suit. Kenyans would wake up on Saturday
morning to all TVs proclaiming "President Uhuru", almost 12 hrs before
Isaack Hassan finally announced Uhuru's win on Saturday afternoon.

The Weekly Citizen in this exclusive report can now report stunning details
of a rigging plot that would have passed undetected if all players had
stuck to the script and the "tyranny of numbers" theory had not fallen flat
on its face on March 4th.

According to CORD insiders and several statistics analysts who have
examined the IEBC voter register when it closed on Dec 18th, over 1,500,000
extra votes were "unexplained votes" votes that were for the presidential
result alone. Since according to the IEBC, every voter was given 6 ballot
papers, IEBC will be hard pressed on how this happened.

If these allegations are proven then, Uhuru's tally will render his
6,173,433 vote announced by the IEBC to 4,673, 433. Which could mean that
Raila Odinga could have won the election if what CORD claims is true.

The well calculated scheme was based on 3 critical things that had to be
done to force in Uhuru. The most important was to force a first round win
for Jubilee.

"It was obviously clear to us that any run-off would result in an
anti-Kikuyu vote in which only Kalenjins and Kikuyu's would vote for Uhuru
while Raila takes off with the rest of the country', says Central Kenya
Senator Elect over drinks at a popular Nairobi spot on the day the IEBC
announced Uhuru as President. "Winning Round One was never an option. It
had to happen"

Getting the numbers was an issue that had worried TNA strategists one year
before striking an alliance with William Ruto's URP as the Jubilee
Coalition. Even if Ruto's Kalenjin backyard was convinced to vote for
Uhuru, the numbers Kalenjins brought in were still not enough. Though the
"Tyranny of Numbers" propaganda was sold as a winning formula, insiders
knew the truth held a different reality. The 50% was simply not there. The
best Jubilee could manage was force a run-off their researchers said they
would lose.

The tyranny of the numbers was the psychological component of the whole
game; and the so was "PEACE" campaign enterprise, says a member of the
civil society

"It is Funny that the tyranny of numbers theory perpetuated by Political
Analyst Mutahi Ngunyi done in February 2013 mentions the same figures Uhuru
got in the final tally" says popular blogger Robert Alai.

Several contingency plans were made to ensure the plan succeeds. One was to
ensure that the Kikuyu and Kalenjin voter turn-out was to hit 95% while
hoping that CORD base's turn-out would remain at the traditional 65% to 70%.

Like many assumptions made by the Jubilee strategy team, their plan on
turn-out was based on assumptions that CORD's base would barely attain
their traditional turnout.

The second critical factor was use of technology to help add up numbers as
the infamous tyranny of numbers depended on factors outside Jubilee's
control.

This plan to be used was borrowed from Ghana's December 2012 Presidential
Elections. The election which is now being contested at the Ghanian Supreme
Court was won by President John Mahama who was announced to have secured
50.7% of votes, enough to avoid a run-off against NPP candidate Nana
Akufo-Addo with 47.7%. Akuf-Addo has filed a petition with evidence that
the vote was won by manipulating the electronic system.

In the Ghanian petition, proof has been revealed the company hired by the
Ghanaian Election Commission to supply data services – SuperLock
Technologies Ltd – also had a contract with the National Democratic
Congress to supply the same services to the party that included tallying.
In the petition NPP says it had found irregularities such as cases of over
voting and instances when people not registered by the new biometric
finger-printing system were able to vote.

According to the NPP and the other parties, these numbers announced by the
Ghana's Electoral Commission did not correspond with actual votes recorded
in the 275 constituencies. They allege tampering of numbers by the
suppliers of IT services in favour of John Mahama. The commission also
reported that turnout was at an all time high of 81%.

In a dramatic incident during the elections, NPP stormed the electronic
suppliers premises and claimed to have caught the company's data personnel
altering results before transmission to the National Tallying Centre

Similar to the Ghanaian case, the company that supplied Kenya's IEBC with
the electronic data and call centre services is Ken Call. The company whose
connection to IEBC were never made public was charged with supplying call
centre services and hosting the data base from where the polling station
results were remitted to the IEBC. Ken Call also has a contract with Uhuru
Kenyatta's The National Alliance party to supply tallying services of
results from polling stations!

"Results from Returning officers at polling stations being transmitted
electronically were first relayed to Ken Call's servers for onward
transmission to Bomas", an IEBC official told Weekly Citizen.

"Imagine the same server was being used to tally results for TNA! This is
where the electronic tampering of results took place as it was easy to
access the same server which was serving both the IEBC and TNA and managed
by the same company. When questions started being raised about the
contradiction between figures announced at polling stations and the ones on
IEBC screens at Bomas, the system mysteriously crashed!"

The official says it is unclear when the company was hired by the IEBC and
why the commission ignored the conflict of interest.

The Weekly Citizen has discovered that like the Ghanaian case the plan by
to rig the Kenyan Presidential vote was 3 pronged;

First, encourage the purchase of BVR kits by the IEBC. The technology was
simply meant to hoodwink the public and crash when plan B was to be
effected. Using unorthodox means that included bribing IEBC officials, the
more experienced 4G solutions which serves India that has over 500 million
voters was disqualified and Code Inc given the job to supply the kits. Code
Inc went into liquidation and was renamed Electoral Systems International
after the Fijian government exposed the company to be a branch of the
Canadian Intelligence Organisation. Part of the system's technology was
supplied by a company linked to a Mr Chirchir, a former Commissioner at the
IEBC
Secondly, as Ghana's NPP claims in their petition, the ruling party used
Super Lock Technologies Ltd to hack into the system and pre-determine a
mathematical formula that adjusts figures as they come for both candidates
while keeping any other candidates at a predetermined formula to ensure
they do not harm the intended outcome. (This possibly explains why Uhuru's
margins with Raila never changed even with random results coming from all
over the country). Yet even with this plan, Jubilee knew they would have to
top up "few" numbers based as the 50% + 1 was still proving elusive with a
week to the election.
The third and final strategy was the real plan. Play with Kenyans' minds by
manipulating results and establishing a lead for Jubilee then crash the
system and go manual. This was arranged by declining to have a back-up
server which would retain evidence of the manipulation. With only one
server, a deliberate crash would be final and would destroy evidence.

According to Maina Kiai, former chairman of the a human rights organization
the technology was a red herring.

"This election was meant to be manual from start to finish loopholes
included" he writes in his Saturday Nation column. "A manual result is what
would allow different results to be announced at the Constituency, County
and Bomas. All these electronic gadgets and equipment were meant to pull
wool over our eyes"

"Even with this plan, the team knew they would have to top up numbers based
as the 50% + 1 still proved elusive with a week to the election" says a TNA
Mp Elect.

Then March 4th came.

While the scheme was to "minimally" add votes to the "tyrannical numbers"
to enable a Round One win, everything went wrong on March 4th Election day
as the electorate in key battle ground areas stunned Jubilee strategists
with an anti Uhuru vote.

Luhyas expected to vote for Musalia up to 50% rebelled and went for Raila.
The 30% of the Kamba vote expected from Kitui through Charity Ngilu failed
to come in. Coast where Jubilee were expecting a 50-50 share with CORD
bolted to Raila. CORD and Raila took off with 70% of the Kisii vote. In
Kalenjin land, voter turnout fell below 70%. The "tyranny of numbers" was
becoming a flop. With predictions by Jubilee statisticians collapsing all
over on Election Day, the team after consultations had to quickly switch to
Plan B.

"This plan was aided by the decision by the IEBC to keep open some polling
stations well after 5pm, the official closing time" says an ODM Chief Agent
who manned a County in Rift Valley. Plan B called for manual voting to
improve the numbers. "In Rift Valley CORD agents were reportedly
intimidated and some left the polling stations as die hard URP activists
some of whom manned the polling centres now took over. "It was hard to
control what they were doing after that. Some people were now being given
2-3 presidential ballots to get their target number. You had no idea who
was voting and who wasn't."

As former Attorney General Amos Wako disclosed at a press conference last
week "It appears the IEBC had several registers as they did not even
gazette any. We will be asking the Supreme Court to examine which register
was being used and which one was valid".

It is obvious CORD's petition will put IEBC to task show an increase in
voter registration after the registration ended on 18th Dec. In some cases
the register grew by 35% in one constituency after reconciliation. On
December 18th 2012, @IEBCpage declared there were 14,337,399 Registered
Voters. The Final Register indicates there were 13,352,533 Voters

Other than manipulate the register using technology, technology was also
becoming an obstacle to get the right numbers and ensure a Round 1 win. The
Voter Identification Kit which required fingerprint identification for
voters could not be manipulated as "ghost" voters could not get in to vote
or double voters. They had to be physically present.

By 2pm, a crisis meeting was convened by Jubilee strategists on how to
shore up numbers in Rift Valley.

Mysteriously the Finger Print Identification kit stopped working. Manual
voting was introduced.

The IEBC electronic tallying system which was relaying fast results with a
53% lead for Uhuru four hours after 5pm, suddenly slowed down with just a
million votes in. Then the "IEBC" server which in reality belonged to Ken
Call crashed. And the results slowed down to a trickle. By 11pm IEBC
announced to the press that announcement of provisional results had been
halted and pushed to Tuesday.

Most IT experts confirm that the amount of data being remitted for the
33,000 polling stations in terms of text messages could not have crashed
the system.

"It is very little data. Safaricom, Airtel and Orange deal with almost 300
million text messages daily. The data from polling stations was not that
much", says an employee of Safaricom on condition of anonymity. "What is
puzzling is why on such an important exercise IEBC and Ken Call did not
install the standard back-up server which would saved remitted results and
revived the process".

The CORD team believes Isaack Hassan's explanations were a cover-up and
that the technology "use" and "failure" were part of the strategy to rig
the elections.

"The electronic system kept Uhuru and Raila at particular percentages to
psychologically make Kenyans believe Uhuru was winning and Raila was
losing. However since the figures at Bomas were not matching forms 34, 35,
36, and the Jubilee "tyranny of numbers" formula had failed, the electronic
tallying system had to go.

Maina Kiai is more brutal in his assessment calling IEBC's excuses
"hogwash". "First it was that the server crashed. Then, than one side of
the disk was full and unable to accept results. Then that presiding
officers were slow in transmitting. The maximum capacity required for data
from 33,000 polling stations is just 2GB, less than what a mobile phone can
take!"

With the plan in progress for manual voting, by Wednesday Rift Valley
Turn-Out was being reported at 90% while Central had risen to 95%. Based on
the Kriegler report this numbers were obviously inflated. However more was
required as Uhuru had dropped below 50%. So delays had to be created for
Returning Officers to re-adjust figures.

The diversionary tactic kept Kenyans patient as Issack Hassan kept talking
of delays caused by "verification", "technological challenges" and
introduced a phrase "complex elections" that would be repeatedly used
throughout the Bomas process.

With the announcement that manual voting would be used, the vote tallying
took a different outlook as the initial 48 hrs in which all provisional
results were to be announced dragged into days and tallying began afresh.
Questions about discrepancies by CORD officials resulted in IEBC throwing
them out. A compliant media was threatened into silence and no criticism of
the IEBC was to be aired.

The Bomas tallying centre was placed under heavy security as the once
accessible Chairman of the IEBC now avoided all media questions regarding
the process.

"This is the most opaque electoral commission and ranks lower than even the
late Kivuitu Commission" said one of CORD's lawyers James Orengo.

In the deliberate confusion that followed strange results started flowing
off the IBC press briefings. Among the cases are;

Wajir North had a 92% Voter Turn-Out for spot whose history indicates
50-60%. In Wajir West, if the Final Register hadn't been adjusted, 99.45%
of the Registered Voters would have voted. In Nyaki East in North Imenti
with 12000 registered voters 15300 are reported to have voted!

In Kajiado South, the people who voted (42,276) is higher than the people
registered in Dec (41,040).Register adjusted to 46,218 to conform. In
Sigor, the people who voted (19,704) is higher than the people registered
in Dec (19,337).Register adjusted to 21,341 to conform.

"How does Turkana Central with 25,970 votes as at 18th Dec end up with
34,486 voters after reconciliation?! Where did 8,516 voters come from?"
asks Dr Makodingo, a political analyst on his twitter page.

Worse still, IEBC's figures refuse to add up in spite of efforts to
"correct errors". Valid Votes (12,222,980) plus Rejected Votes (108,975)
add up to 12,331,955 and not their tally of 12,338,667!

"It is strange that 1,500,000 persons only cast a vote for a president and
across Kenya this number is reflected in joint votes cast for Senators,
Governors, Mps, Women Reps or County Reps. It is an obvious case of manual
ballot box stuffing and double voting for Uhuru" says Statistics analyst Dr
Makodingo

Presently CORD may only have to prove that the 8,000 votes votes Uhuru
received to add to his declared 50% is fraudulent. If that is done the
Supreme Court can order a fresh poll within 60 days.

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