The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has signed a contract with OT Morpho, a French firm which will be supplying information technology services to the IEBC, to ensure that Kenya’s upcoming repeat elections are conducted ethically and fairly.
If the agreement is implemented fully, all election officials at polling stations and constituency tallying centres will only send signed result forms to the IEBC’s transmission system, eliminating the contentious text messages used in the previous election. OT Morpho has employed 400 people to reconfigure the kits and will also be deploying one support engineer per constituency on election day.
In the new agreement, presiding officers at polling stations will now be able to transmit results to both the constituency tallying centre and the national tallying centre. They could not do that during the last General Election and, in some places, were baffled that there were results from their constituencies on the IEBC portal yet they had not seen the actual forms.
The provisional results transmitted by the presiding officers will be consolidated at the constituency level into reports for the IEBC to compare the provisional data transmitted from the field with the official Forms 34B.
The system will be programmed to generate reports on an hourly basis for all constituencies and these will be displayed on a portal.
The agreement states that the connection between Safaricom, which will provide the SIM cards, and the dedicated communication channel for the transmission of the results will remain the same as the one used during the last General Election.
Edited by Fundisiwe Maseko
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