The Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission (IEBC) has selected Safaricom to transmit the poll results in the repeat presidential elections expected to take place on 26 October 2017 in Kenya. Safaricom has been requested to deploy electoral kits in all 40,883 polling stations throughout Kenya.
Safaricom will also transmit election results from the Kenya Integrated Electoral Management System’s (KIEMS) kits at the polling stations to the IEBC servers.
During the 8 August 2017 elections, three telecom operators were selected to provide connectivity between polling centres and the IEBC’s national tallying centre, in 78 percent of the country, with 3G and 2G network connections. The companies were also expected to provide technical support to the IEBC before, during and after election day. Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya were the two other telecom companies that provided services to the IEBC. Safaricom’s network was deployed in 22 counties, Airtel’s in 14 and Telkom’s in 11 counties during the during the elections on 08 August 2017.
The opposition party, the National Super Alliance (NASA), earlier this week attacked Safaricom in public. The leader of NASA Raila Odinga linked Safaricom to the August 2017 election results failure.
Safaricom has however defended itself against the allegations saying contrary to Raila’s claims, results from the KIEMS kits from Safaricom zones were transmitted and are on the IEBC web portal. Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore, explained that Safaricom was to provide a dedicated secure tunnel to transmit the encrypted data from the KIEMS kits to the IEBC server, also known as a Virtual Private Network or VPN.
Edited by Fundisiwe Maseko
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