Elections in Africa have been widely tainted with rigging and manipulation due to the manual system used to tally the votes but as some countries try to move with the times and embrace Information Communications Technologies it seems like a new space for vote manipulation has been created.  Even in first world countries like United States of America electronic voting machine fraud led the to the 2000 Al Gore/Bush election controversy. Some may still argue and say ICTs are the way to go if we are to avoid the three months wait to get election results. But after watching Kenya’s electronic voting system collapse, a dark spell was cast over both the electronic and manual voting systems as the Kenyan vote was put at risk.

The recent elections in Kenya put the system to test in the presidential poll when it failed at the critical moment of need. Election officials were forced to resort to manual registers. A lot of questions are still being asked about how safe your vote is with ICTs. The electronic live streaming of the results crashed on Day 2 of national tallying and overload was blamed for the system crush. Whether it was real overload, or human tampering it still tainted the elections results with accusations of irregularities now being contested in court with one presidential aspirant refusing to concede defeat. Maybe the electoral body in Kenya had so much faith in its electronic system that they never bothered to put a back up plan in the event of the mishap, but those from Odinga’s camp will tell you that after the system failure figures started fluctuating in favor of Uhuru.

This entry was posted on March 12th, 2013 at 12:04 pm by Lenard Kamwendo and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.