Kenya court says it nullified election over possible hacking
KIGALI, Rwanda — Kenya’s Supreme Court on Wednesday said it had nullified last month’s presidential election because the voting may have been hacked, and accused the electoral commission of failing to verify results before announcing them.
It stopped short, however, of calling the vote rigged, and rejected the opposition’s assertion that President Uhuru Kenyatta had used state resources and undue influence to sway the outcome.
The commission had declared Kenyatta the winner of the Aug. 8 vote, with 54 percent of the ballots, to 44 percent for the opposition leader, Raila Odinga — a margin of about 1.4 million votes. Odinga challenged the result, and said that the last two elections had also been stolen from him.
The court’s rationale was narrowly tailored: It said the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission had announced the results prematurely, even before it had received all the required forms tallying the results from polling stations.
The electoral body “cannot therefore be said to have verified the results,” said Philomena Mwilu, the deputy chief justice. She singled out the electoral commission chairman, Wafula Chebukati, for failing to explain why the results were not transmitted according to electoral rules.
“Elections are not only about numbers,” Mwilu said. “Elections should be like a math test where you only get points for the answer if you show your workings.”
She also criticized the electoral commission for refusing to comply with court orders to open its computer servers, saying its refusal gave credence to opposition claims that the vote had been manipulated.
“This contemptuous disobedience with the court order leaves us with no option but to accept the petitioner’s claims that the IT system was infiltrated and the data therein interfered with,” she said. “Or officials themselves interfered with the data or simply refused to accept that it had bungled the transmission system and were unable to verify the data.”