Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Kenya Supreme Court clarifies a common sense interpretation of duties of IEBC Chairman as National Returning Officer

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Daily Nation: “Chebukati cannot edit poll results“:

In their judgement, five judges of the court said where there are discrepancies between results in Forms 34A and 34B, the chairman should announce the results and leave the matter to the court.

The judges said Mr Chebukati has the duty to verify the results as transmitted electronically.

However, whenever he detects errors, he should notify the parties, observers and the public and leave it to the election court.

. . . .

However, the Supreme Court faulted Wafula Chebukati, who is national returning officer, of announcing the winner before comparing the results in Forms 34A and 34B.

The court stated, “There can be no logical explanation as to why in tallying the Forms 34B into Forms 34B into the Forms 34C, this primary document (Forms 34A) was completely disregarded.”

I would say that the underlying factual–if not “logical”–explanation is that Mr. Chebukati gambled on August 11, likely under great pressure, that the “Maina Kiai decision” left unappealed by the IEBC, left a loophole that could be exploited to announce a national “result” early from the purported constituency returns in spite of the knowledge that a huge number of the polling station returns had not been transmitted as required by law.  This gamble did not work and Mr. Chebukati has now obtained from the Supreme Court notice to all interested parties that it still will not work going forward.

Kenya’s election “compromised and contaminated” or “compromised and bungled” by IEBC finds Supreme Court

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The Supreme Court of Kenya’s long awaited reading of its full opinion on the presidential election petition this morning squarely hammered the discrepancies between the process requirements of the law and what the evidence showed  happened.

The Court found explicitly, for example, that the affidavit submitted by the IEBC asserting that all of the tally papers had security features was contradicted by the documentary evidence eventually produced by the IEBC under order of the Court in the hearing.

The Judiciary website seems to have been down from before the announcement so I will have to wait to read the opinion.

The Court made clear that there would be no basis for it to uphold a similarly compromised process in a fresh election.

The ball is squarely in the “court” of the IEBC and its advocates and funders to grapple with the “contamination” and its causes to find a solution.

(On the submission of the Preliminary Statements of Election Observation Missions as evidence to bolster the defense of the IEBC, the Court said they could not be considered as they did not go beyond looking at the voting and counting at a sample of polling stations.  This is good news in correcting one of the flaws from the original 2013 presidential petition litigation.)

Update: Business Daily: “”Supreme  Court says IEBC failures led to poll nullification”.   

Globe and Mail:  “Kenyan Court blasts Election Commission as political tensions rise”

 

Kenya Election: How IEBC CEO explained what was legally required for electronic Results Transmission and how KIEMS was to meet requirement

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“IEBC’s high-tech system to guard against ballot stuffing” The Standard July 22, 2017

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has assured that the integrity of the August 8 election has been guaranteed through tamper-proof technology.

The Kenya Integrated Elections Management Systems (KIEMS) has unique features that will make double voting, ballot stuffing, and irreconcilable voting patterns impossible. IEBC is already preparing to deploy 45,000 KIEMS kits to be used in all the 40,883 polling stations across the country.

Every polling station has been allocated a Kit with a maximum number of 700 voters depending on the size of the polling centre. By implication, voters in a polling station cannot exceed the allocated number.

The KIEMS technology has two main functions in this election. The first is biometric identification of voters on the election day and results transmission after counting the votes.

The Commission has made it mandatory for all voters to be identified biometrically to close the doors for possibility of resurrection of dead voters.

IEBC Chief executive officer Ezra Chiloba said the Commission has invested heavily in technology and can guarantee successful transmission of election results.

“We have no choice really. The law already demands of us to electronically transmit presidential results from the polling station to the tallying centres,” he said.

After counting of results, the presiding officers in the presence of party agents are expected to type the total number of votes garnered by each candidate into the kit.

The kit aggregates the results automatically and the total number of votes cast for all the candidates is recorded. In cases where the number of voters exceeds the total number of registered voters, the kits shall automatically reject the results. This measure, according to the Commission, effectively makes ballot stuffing impossible.

As an additional measure to guarantee the integrity of elections results, the presiding officer shall scan Form 34A using the KIEMS kit. The Form 34A is signed by both the presiding officer and party agents. Once scanned, the presiding officer shall, together with the text results, send the same to the national tallying centre and constituency tallying centres.

The kit shall equally report turnout trends periodically throughout the day. With this kind of monitoring, the Commission says, ability to identify abnormal voting patterns is guaranteed.

At the end of the voting, said Mr Chiloba, the presiding officers in the presence of party agents are required to reconcile the number of voters recorded by KIEMS as having voted and the number of ballot papers issued.

“We have two procedures that minimise the risk of ballot stuffing. One, the voter turnout as recorded by KIEMS. Two, the ballot papers reconciliation that happens at the end of voting. The number of ballots papers issued and the records of voter turnout as registered by KIEMS should be able to reconcile,” he said.

The Commission contends that once the presiding officer has pressed the “Submit” button, the results cannot be changed by anyone.

Using an encrypted format, the results shall then be transmitted to the tallying centres through a secure network in real-time. The public will be able to view the results online. Similarly, Media will have a dedicated connection to access real-time results as well.

According to ICT sources within the commission, the KIEMS have a unique in-built audit trail. The in-build audit trail enables the commission to collect all the kits and to retrieve records from the SD cards for any analysis at the end of voting. This in-built accountability tools implies that the process of voting can be subjected to objective scrutiny at any point in time after voting.
.  .  .  .

Clearly, much of what Chiloba and the IEBC described here just over two weeks before the election did not actually happen after the votes were cast and counted on election day.

Why?  Well, much of the explanation likely rests on the new information disclosed in the Registrar’s reports on the Forms 34A and Forms 34B and the IEBC ICT review in the Supreme Court litigation.  Other things were going on within the process than described.

Election Litigation in Kenya: What is status of preservation and sharing of forensic evidence from KIEMS on Results Transmission? [update 25 Aug]

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Short answer is people involved are extremely quiet on this front.

[UPDATE:  Good news!  U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec spoke yesterday at the annual National Conference of the Law Society of Kenya.  The text of his remarks is here.  Based on his remarks about transparency and the rule of law, I’m sure we will step up and do the right thing here.]

On my end I had my periodic status call today on my 2015 FOIA request to USAID about records relating to our support for the IEBC in 2013, including the failed Results Transmission System. Nothing new since April.

This is part of what I wrote July 3:

According to the EU and Carter Center election observation missions from the 2007 and 2013 elections, perhaps one-quarter to one-third of election officials at individual polling stations did not post the Form 34 showing the presidential vote count as required, so there has been ample room in each of these elections for numbers to change between the count of ballots and sealing of the ballot box at the polling station and the reported “tally” by which the president was named in Nairobi.

Unfortunately, a fair understanding of what happened in 2013 gets worse, in that it turns out that it would surely seem that the IEBC and the donors should have know ahead of time that the electronic reporting system was not going to work–but elected to project what must have been false confidence, followed by “surprise” at its failure. The president of IFES testified to the U.S. Congress in 2013 after the election that the failure was caused by a botched procurement. What was unsaid was that this was not just a procurement failure by the IEBC which IFES would have been expected to know about from its role as “embedded” within the IEBC to provide technical assistance, but that this was apparently also a botched United States government procurement from USAID through IFES, from what I eventually learned recently from my 2015 FOIA request as discussed in my post here from April:

“Kenya Election FOIA news: [heavily redacted] Election Assistance agreement shows US paid for failed 2013 “Results Transmission System”

From the Kenya Election and Political Process Strengthening (KEPPS) Program from USAID for the last Kenyan election:

“Considering the role that results transmission played in the 2007 election violence, IFES will build on its recent work with Kenya’s results transmission system to further enhance it and ensure its sustainability. IFES will ensure this system is fully installed, tested and operational for the 2012 election. Furthermore, IFES will fund essential upgrades and adjustments to this results transmission system.” 

[p.28 of the Kenya Election and Political Process Strengthening 2012 Program – Cooperative Agreement between USAID and CEPPS (coalition of NDI, IFES and IRI)]

This USAID Agreement with the consortium of IFES, NDI and IRI makes up the first 236 pages of what I was told were approximately 1800 pages of documents and attachments provided by the USAID Mission in Kenya to the Washington FOIA office by January 2016 in response to my FOIA request of October 2015.

Unfortunately, I have still not gotten any of the rest of these pages covering contract files and correspondence, as well as USAID transactions with Smith & Ouzman, Ltd., the British firm that was convicted of bribing Kenyan election and education officials to buy their products in the infamous “Chickengate” scandal.

In spite of persistent follow up over these many months, I don’t have any further information as to whether I am likely to get more of these documents released in time for the new election (under the current Kenya Electoral Assistance Program awarded to IFES last year).

The 2017 Kenyan Supreme Court petitions are under a final seven day deadline of today.  [Update: NASA has filed a challenge Friday night in Nairobi, to my understanding joined by The Thirdway Alliance.  Do not know of others.]

Will Kamlesh Pattni’s court victory encourage Uhuru and Ruto on ICC cases?

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"Magnate"

Obviously this is an irreverent question, and not the sort of thing that could be countenanced in academia or in diplomatic circles. But I just couldn’t help myself since I write about practical realities in politics and governance here, while watching the podcast of Maina Kiai and Joel Barkan discussing the “Implications of the Kenyan Election” @NED and a question from the audience has inquired about the latest Pattni ruling.

Last week we learned that Kamlesh “Paul” Pattni, one of Kenya’s wealthiest “men of business” (not like Uhuru, apparently, but very wealthy) had been the beneficiary of a big legal breakthrough as the media reported that High Court Justice Joseph Mbalu Mutava had ruled back in March that Pattni could not be prosecuted in the trial courts for the notorious Goldenberg corruption scandal.

“Judge defiant after clearing Pattni of Goldenberg scam”

The judge also observed that the report by Commission of Inquiry chaired by former Court of Appeal judge Samuel Bosire on the scandal on which the existing criminal case was anchored is flawed and that most witnesses had died or their memories have faded.

Pattni moved to the High Court in August last year seeking to quash the criminal proceedings at the magistrate’s court and stop the State from further criminal prosecution on the scandal estimated to have cost Kenya billions of shillings.

On Pattni’s prayer that the media be barred from reporting on the case, the judge said that the court could only intervene to set parameters of reporting to protect someone’s rights.

Last November, Justice Mutava’s conduct was put to question in a petition filed against him by Havi and Company Advocates on behalf of the International Centre for Policy and Conflict (ICPC). It sought to have the judge removed from office over his handling of the Pattni cases.

ICPC had argued that the whole matter had not been handled through the correct procedure and some court orders made were outside of the law.

The petitioner had faulted the judge’s handling of the case and accused him of being part of “an orchestrated cover-up to aid and abet Pattni’s criminal conduct”.

Justice Mutava was later transferred to Kericho from where he wrote the controversial judgment on Mr Pattni’ application for the case to be scrapped.

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Washington event on “The Implications of the Kenyan Election” tomorrow; Mutunga’s judicial philosophy

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Tomorrow afternoon at the National Endowment for Democracy, Joel Barkan and Maina Kiai will discuss “The Implications of the Kenyan Election”. Watch the video stream from 1930 to 2100 GMT or 1:30 to 3:00pm EDT (Washington) time.

In continuing to try to come to grips with the lack of substance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the election petition cases, I am reminded of an article from The Africa Report for February, titled “Can They Pull It Off? The judiciary and electoral commission say they are prepared for the 4 March vote and will not repeat the mistakes of the contested December 2007 polls”.

In the article, the new Chief Justice Mutunga gives what my be some foreshadowing of the Court’s ultimate deference to the IEBC in the election petitions:

Keeping the three arms of government separate and independent should not rule out constructive cooperation, says Mutunga: “I see us protecting the independence of the judiciary but also realising that you’ve got to talk to the ministry of finance, to parliament and that sometimes you might also ask the president to intervene.”

A dialogue between the arms of state is important, insists Mutunga: “As a matter of fact, President [Mwai] Kibaki has never called me about a case. The the hotline [from the President’s office to the Chief Justice’s] is not hot — nobody uses it!” As chief justice, Mutunga joined discussions last year with businesses and President Kibaki about how to ensure the elections were credible and peaceful. He added that the judiciary is committed to helping the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). For example, it has allocated special courts to deal with all electoral disputes quickly.

. . . .

There is, however, nervousness about how the IEBC will fare . . . .

If the role of the Court is to work collectively with the other parts of the Government to promote “credibility” to keep “peace” then perhaps it is best to ignore “legalistic” details like more votes than registered voters in many polling places, and the raising and lowering of the number of registered voters in various parts of the country. Perhaps this is what is meant by a “robust” and “progressive” jurisprudence.

 

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Thoughts on Kenya’s Supreme Court opinion [Updated]

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UPDATE–April 21: Read Kenyan lawyer Wachira Maina’s devastating critique of the Court’s opinion from the new East African. Or at the AfriCOG website here: “Verdict on Kenya’s presidential election petition: Five reasons the judgement fails the legal test”.

Here is the full Kenyan Supreme Court opinion released this morning. It’s 113 pages, but most all of it is taken up by accounts of some of the arguments presented by the various attorneys.

The Court elected to apply a standard of proof that would require “in the case of data specific electoral requirements” petitioner to prove irregularities “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Overall, the Supreme Court simply deferred to the IEBC to decide how to run the election. The Court justified its constrained rulings on allowing evidence on the basis of strict and very short deadlines which it asserts are justified by the importance of the Presidential election–thus leaving more detailed trials for the more than 180 other challenges filed so far in the Courts below for the other races.

The Court did not give rulings on the admission of evidence such as the videotapes presented by AfriCOG’s counsel of results being announced at the County level that differed substantially from those announced by the IEBC at its national tally centre in Nairobi, or otherwise grapple with any specifics of reported anomalies, including those among the sample of 22 polling stations that were to be re-tallied. Nor did it address the fact that its order to review all 33,000 Forms 34 and the Forms 36 from all constituencies was only slightly over half completed.

The Court declined to impose legal consequences in terms of the announced election outcome from the failure of the IEBC’s technology, but significantly did find that the main cause of the failures of the electronic voter identification system and the electronic results transmission system appeared to be procurement “squabbles” among IEBC members. “It is, indeed, likely, that the acquisition process was marked by competing interests involving impropriety, or even criminality: and we recommend that this matter be entrusted to the relevant State agency, for further investigation and possible prosecution.”

See my previous post asking why we should trust the IEBC in light of the procurement integrity failings.

In closing, I have to note that the Court gave itself an extra two weeks after the deadline for its ruling to make any kind of explanation for that ruling. Then gave itself an additional two days. Similar flexibility in considering the facts of the case itself could have allowed it to do a more credible and substantive job of actually reviewing the election.

[Updated] “The People’s Court” launch Friday morning in Nairobi

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Update: Here is the story from The Star.  And here is “The People’s Court”!

The Daily Nation coverage is here.

10:00am Friday at the Sarova Stanley in Nairobi InformAction and AfriCOG will launch a new online collaboration:

The website is a joint project between AfriCOG and InformAction and is an attempt to present in public all the evidence around the recent elections. Some of that is from the cases filed at the Supreme Court, but it will also include material and information from citizens, observers and others. Citizens will be provided a location to post /Number to send text messages in order to submit any information and evidence they gathered so that the complete truth on the recent elections can emerge.

Importantly, The People’s Court will be an accountability mechanism on the IEBC and the Supreme Court. Analysis of the Court’s decision will be posted on the website hoping to engender critical and constructive discussions on why they took the decision that they did, in the face of the evidence that will be presented.

The People’s Court gives the public unique access to all the evidence filed at the Supreme Court in the Civil Society petition challenging the election process.

By inviting citizen participation, we aim to make institutions accountable and uphold the high democratic standards of the constitution. We also hope that the website will be used as a forum for debate and opinion, celebrating freedom of expression in Kenya and our vibrant tradition of democracy activism.

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AfriCOG’s vital role as Petioner 4 challenging the Kenya’s IEBC

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Like everyone else who is engaged but not able to be in the courtroom, I am watching live broadcast of the preliminary hearings in Kenya’s Supreme Court of the petitions challenging the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s March 9 announcement of “final” election results.

The live broadcast of these proceedings is an amazing development–to me of much greater significance than the presidential campaign debates.

I wanted to take just a moment to stress the role of Gladwell Otieno as petitioner as executive director of AfriCOG. The AfriCOG filing is petition no. 4–followed by CORD’s petition no. 5. Although the court has tended to give an unbalanced share of time to the array of government-paid lawyers representing the two defendants who are in lock-step, Hassan as the national returning officer in the presidential vote, and the IEBC which he chairs, AfriCOG, as an open governance organization, has taken on the challenge of defending the interests of the voters and integrity of the process itself.

This is not about Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta–this is about the Kenyan democracy.

It has been interesting to see the respondents file replies to AFriCOG’s petition trying to ignore the issues by simply referring to the “already filed” responses to the subsequent CORD petition–it is in their interest to try to frame the issue as one about a challenge by a losing candidate rather than about why the IEBC did not do its job, and meet its obligation to each citizen under the Constitution, of holding a simple, fair and transparent election.

Here is a Question and Answer release from AfriCOG on the Petition.

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“Media Zombie” stirs as Kenyan legal process moves forward [updated]

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[Update: here is the Sunday Standard, “How Raila’s poll petition may change the whole game”]

“The many questions IEBC needs to clear with Kenyans over elections.” The Saturday Nation

The “media zombie” awakes with a recitation of damning basic questions about the systems employed by the IEBC.

AfriCOG and other Kenyan civil society groups were left as lonely voices before the election while the public relations of the IEBC and the rest of the Kenyan Government, propped up as best I can see so far by the “western donors” (with money from taxpayers like me) and the “aid industry” peddled false assurance. I will have to admit that the situation is significantly worse than I had realized.

And then beyond the systems that were not even seriously in place, we have the specifics of bogus numbers coming out with election challenge petitions by AfriCOG and by the CORD campaign filed today. So much like 2007 only worse in terms of a mass “overvote” in the presidential race.

“Halt the Party, It’s not yet Uhuru”, Wycliffe Muga in The Star.

In the New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman notes the extreme pressure on Kenya’s judges:

The case is sure to be a test of Kenya’s recently overhauled judiciary. It is now much more widely respected, but some analysts have questioned whether all six Supreme Court justices will be able to withstand the pressure of refereeing such a high stakes contest for power. Even before the election, the chief justice received death threats, and analysts have raised questions about the independence of some of the other justices.

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