"Presidential voter disparity caused by prisons, diaspora votes; KIEMS kits convert forms from JPEG to PDF" - IEBC lawyer Mahat Somane

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has argued that the voter disparity between presidential candidates and other elective seats during the August 9 2022 General Election was caused by diaspora and prisons votes.

In his submission during the second day of presidential petition hearing at the Supreme Court on Thursday, IEBC lawyer Mahat Somane said that there was no evidence of unexplainable voter disparity.

"You have to minus prisons and diaspora which actually vote for the presidential elections only, the other difference we can account it in the stray ballots.

"No evidence has been presented to show that there were unexplainable variances between votes cast for President and other elective positions," Somane submitted.

The lawyer further said that no one had the capacity or the ability to counter the transmission of Forms 34A from polling stations to the public portal, not even the IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati.

"There is no one who can upload Forms 34A to the portal except the KIEMS Kits. What Kenyans voted on August 9 is what was transmitted and what was actually announced by the Chairman. The will of Kenyans was carried out through and through," he said.

Somane says that the IEBC public portal was designed in such a manner that not even a single attempt to hack it could be successful, "something which frustrated hackers."

"380 million people accessed our public portal, and it did not even blink for a second. Its security, its firewall, and SoC are military grade. People are so frustrated in trying to hack our system because it is based on broad chain," he added.

He has now urged the Supreme Court to investigate all the evidence provided to them and prosecute anyone found guilty of forging documents.

"Some of the forms which have been presented to you (Supreme Court) are doctored forms. The allegations of the forms fall flat to what we have presented and the allegations that they are presenting are an attempt to present the court with forged evidence. Take necessary actions against any officer who has made any forged evidence. The truths only have one leg to stand," the said.

JPEG-PDF argument

The lawyer also dismissed the petitioner's claims that the IEBC result transmission system was infiltrated and results in Form 34As doctored in favour of President-elect William Ruto. He also revealed that the KIEMS kits are designed in such a way that they have an onboard imaging software that automatically transforms images of forms taken into PDF before transmission to the central server.

“The kit takes an image, imbedded in it (the kit) is a scanner so the image is scanned as a PDF. We don’t have any other output."