Another reversal on a Kenya election observation? Without additional fanfare that I have picked up on, the Carter Center published on the web on October 16th their Final Report on the Election Observation Mission for Kenya’s March 4 elections.

I admit to being pleasantly surprised upon wading through the details to find much more direct acknowledgment of the shortcomings of the process, especially the tallying and reporting of results, than I would have expected from the previous media reporting on the various communications about this observation mission over the months since the vote, as well as a major change in conclusions.

Read it for yourself if you are interested in Kenyan elections and the extent to which the announced presidential result in this most recent election was or wasn’t reliable, but the bottom line here is that the Carter Center has commendably stepped back from their previous assurance from April 4, a month after the election, that “in spite of serious shortcomings” the IEBC’s improvised paper-based tally process “presented enough guarantees to preserve the expression of the will of the Kenyan voters”.  In the Final Report the tally/tabulation process is discussed in Pages 51-58, concluding in summary, “Overall, Kenya partially fulfilled its obligations to ensure that the will of the people, as expressed through the ballot box, is accurately recorded and communicated.” (p. 57).

The report itemizes and discusses five categories of “Challenges in Tabulation”:

I.  Failure of Electronic Transmission of Provisional Results

II. Inadequate Publication of Tabulation Procedures

. . . .

Therefore, the available instructions appeared to be insufficient to guarantee the integrity and accuracy of numerical tabulation. . . . (p. 54)

III. Inadequate Observer and Election Agent Access to National Tally Center

. . . .

However, the national tally center did not provide enough transparency for observers or party agents to assess the overall integrity of tally of presidential results.  Unfortunately, the Center regrets the IEBC decision to confine party agents and observers to the gallery of the national tally center, making effective and meaningful observation impossible.

The Center observed many of the same kind of discrepancies in the tally procedures that had generated so much criticism and speculation in 2007; results announced at the national tally center differed from those announced at constituency level, missing tally forms, inconsistencies between presidential and parliamentary tallies, instances of more votes than registered voters, discrepancies between turnouts of the presidential and parliamentary elections, and expulsion of party agents from the tally space at the national tally center.

. . . . (p. 54, footnotes omitted)

IV. Discrepancies Between the Published Voter Register and Announced Results

The Center’s examination of reported final results for the presidential election, recorded on form 36, showed noteworthy discrepancies. . . .  (p. 55)

V. Nonpublication of Detailed Election Results

One of Kenya’s core obligations concerns promoting transparency in elections and other public processes. . . . The Center remains concerned that the IEBC has not published detailed official results disaggregated at the polling station level. (p.55)

For more information on the Kenya election vote count, although not cited by the Carter Center, please see the audit performed by the Mars Group Kenya, noting the “missing” status of the Form 34s recording the tallies from each of 2,627 polling streams.

See Africa Confidential: “Carter’s quiet doubts“.

Previously:

*Are “free and fair” elections passé in Kenya?

*Carter Center calls it as they see it in the DRC

*Why would we trust the Kenyan IEBC vote tally when they engaged in fraudulent procurement practices for key technology?