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ARTICLE by Ben Roberts

Group Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Liquid Intelligent Technologies.

Putting Technology On Trial - ICT Enhanced Elections 2.0

If you had to think about it without picking a side, would you say technology won, lost or confused the election process?

2022 had two moments in Kenya’s history when the world collectively held its breath. One was the afternoon of 15 August when Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Commissioner Wafula Chebukati announced William Samoei Ruto as President-Elect to the mellifluous tunes of a choir on repeat; the other, just as heightened if slightly less lyrical, when Chief Justice Martha Koome read the Supreme Court verdict on the Raila Odinga & Martha Wangari Karua V Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission & Others presidential petition citing phrases such as ‘hot air,’ and ‘bombshell.’ It had been a tense month of dread with an expectation of violence hanging in the air. There is no denying Kenyan elections have been fraught over the past 15 years. The stakes are always so high, business grinds to a halt. 2022’s Elections 2.0 dated back to The Kriegler Commission Report of 2007, one that conclusively merged the manual electoral system with a technological one. In his paper Digital Dilemmas: The Unintended Consequences

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Of Election Technology, Political Scientist Professor Nic Cheeseman puts forward that, “Digital technologies are increasingly used in elections around the world. Where the resources and capacity of the state are limited, some have argued that such technologies make it possible to rapidly “leapfrog” to cleaner and more credible elections.”

Nearly half of elections in Africa now involve the use of technology, especially to assist in the areas of voter registration, biometric authentication of voters and results transmission. The rapid expansion of ownership of digital gadgets combined with other emerging technologies such as social media have enabled widescale participation by citizens in campaigning, activism, commentating in and around election periods, all at the speed of light. But it does come at a high cost, and Kenya’s elections are reported to be one of the most expensive per citizen in the whole of Africa by topping $1 billion. I love technology, and I do trust in tech to have the potential to increase transparency and improve reporting speed in any complex numerical or accounting process. But any such process that relies on humans to collect mass data, and input that data into digital systems, is going to have some margins of error which can be by data entry mistakes or deliberate actions of those humans in the process. The key to success of election tech falls somewhere between making the process easy for the humans involved to minimise mistakes, and to provide oversight and verification to make it impossible to have deliberate actions of tampering with the process. Technology has been deployed progressively in elections over the years using methods like indelible ink made in India on the fingers of voters who have cast their vote, security features on the ballot papers, and even replacement of the paper “X marks the spot” method with voting machines. But when an election is close or contested, it can be complex to review the electoral process.

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I remember all too well as I was in the US at the time following the Bush vs Gore 2000 election, watching the painful comedy of election officers taking days and weeks to closely examine pieces of paper looking for “hanging Chads”, a technical term popularised at the time to describe a tiny piece of paper that had not quite been punched out of a voting card by the voting machine. However, in recent decades the use of high-tech digital solutions has become more prevalent, with Latin America (yes, I said Latin America) leading the way in this area of innovation, deploying a digital voting pilot in Columbia as early as 1992. In 1998 voters in Brazil cast their votes using computers on a secure LAN, and Venezuela introduced the scanning and transmission of results. Technology that found its way to Elections 2.0. In fact, Smartmatic International Holding b.v, a multinational company with roots in Venezuela, was founded in 2000, inspired by the hanging Chad debacle, to explore better technologies to improve elections. Digital election technology can include: -

• Biometric registration records voter’s fingerprints, faces, or other biodata to authenticate the person when they come to vote. • Alternatives to the ballot paper using Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting, optical character recognition (OCR) and Optical Mark Recognition (OMR). • Electronic transmission of vote tallies, to speed up collation, and to guarantee against tampering of election materials during ground transport. • Counting and collating applications (even Microsoft Excel is very good at this) often using mobile phones. With all this innovation, plus a history of contested elections and electionassociated violence, it is little wonder therefore that Kenya has been an adopter of some of these technologies, applied for the unique environment on the ground. The 2017 elections featured the first use of the Kenya Integrated Electoral Management System (KIEMS), which featured biometric voter registration and validation at polling stations, counting ballots directly at the station, and electronic transmission of results forms, and online public cloud based central systems to publish results.

But the technology itself was deeply challenged, with allegations of hacking by the opposition at the time who successfully contested the elections in court, then later boycotted the second run of the presidential elections. The Kenya 2017 election story also saw the tragic and brutal murder of Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) ICT Director Chris Msando. The 2017 Supreme Court judgement brought legal clarifications that led to number of process and systems improvements by IEBC in the elections of 2022. Also, two important developments in ICT Infrastructure and foundational legislation had taken place in the fiveyear timespan. The rollout of 4G networks across the country has increased the availability of faster mobile data signals in Kenya. A 2022 update to the Access Gap Study from the Communications Authority of Kenya, noted that over 96 per cent of the population of Kenya has a mobile phone data signal of some sort (2G, 3G or 4G) and that in fact 4G coverage is greater than 3G, due to the lower frequency band used which penetrates larger distances. There are parts of where you can’t get a mobile phone signal though, and last year on a summit attempt for Batian Peak on Mt Kenya, I had a four-day (enforced) break from the digital world, since much of the Mt Kenya National Park lacks a signal. However, my guide carried a satellite phone for emergencies, and I also successfully tracked my progress using Liquid Intelligent Technologies 0G IoT (Internet of Things) network that is purpose-built for low bandwidth IoT communications. In this world, we are never away from a digital signal of some sort! Since the last election, Kenya has new legislation, the Kenya Data Protection Act (2019), in place to protect data of citizens in Kenya. In her article In Kenya’s 2022 Elections, Technology and Data Protection Must Go Hand-in-Hand, Deputy Data Protection Commissioner Rose Mosero discusses the impact of this legislation and associated regulations on the ICT solutions utilised in the election process. The new law has led to increased protection over voter’s rights to privacy in the data that is collected for the purpose of voter registration, clarified cross border data transfer regulations and has already brought breakthroughs in the process of registering citizens as members of political parties. Since 2020, the Office of Registration of Political Parties (ORPP) has enabled online systems where a person can check if they have been registered as a party member, and to resign or change one’s party membership if they find they no longer want to be associated with a particular group. Rose predicts that some harmonisation of election legislation may follow to further comply with data protection, and that future elections will balance the rights of people involved in elections. It was noted by election observers and vigilant Kenyans as well in 2022 that publicly online completed forms 34A published phone numbers of returning offices and party agents, and tragically, IEBC staff have once again been harassed, assaulted, and even murdered during this election cycle. Overall, the election technology used in 2022 seemed to work. A small number of polling station KIEMS kits failed to work out of the box but were rapidly replaced by working ones. The kits authenticated voters by fingerprint, or by face image where fingerprints did not work. IEBC provided a portal where one could check in advance for one’s registered polling station, using features to ensure data protection, though some

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Did Kenya Get It Right With Technology In The General Elections?

Following the contentious 2007 general elections that led to the death of 1100 people, Kenya introduced technology to manage the process with the aim of making it more transparent and credible. Technology, therefore, was used in the subsequent elections (2013, 2017 and 2022) in voter registration, identification and in the transmission of results. The use of technology, however, remains a major source of concern to some stakeholders who do not trust the process. To them, the process, especially the transmission of result, is open to manipulation. For this reason, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) put up an open portal for the presidential results forms 34A in the 2022 general elections. How would you score the IEBC on a scale of 1-10 on managing the tech aspect of the elections? The Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet), a multistakeholder think tank for ICT policy and regulation deployed 90 observers in 21 counties to observe the tech component of the Kenyan general elections. The observers focused on tech preparedness, the voting process, transmission, and post-election processes.

Open Portal

KICTANet, in a report, lauded the IEBC for furnishing an open portal for presidential results forms 34A, where anyone could access them. The lobby also commended the electoral body for the high success rate in the use of KIEMs for voter identification, ensuring the stability of servers throughout the process and successful transmission of results from the polling stations to the national tallying centre. “The IEBC was adequately prepared in case of network challenges. There’s great network coverage across the countries except for very few counties in the Coastal region. More than 90 per cent of Form 34As were transmitted 25 hours after closing and counting of polls. The internet across the country worked well, and there was no internet shutdown or any other forms of network interference,” it said. However, the Think Tank noted that, “The only tech/automated aspects have been voter identification and the open portal for the results.” They asked the IEBC to automate other functions including voting and tallying. “IEBC should explore a completely tech-enabled election. This would hasten the tallying process and lessen the anxiety and mistrust around results,” it said.

It further called on the Commission to share all forms of electoral positions in an open portal to decentralise focus from the presidential results.

KICTANet also recommended to the electoral body to avail to observers, political parties and generally to the public, an online portal (akin to the online Forms 34A) the metadata of the Kiems kits that show the exact turnout at each polling station, opening and closing times, voter identification among others. They asked the IEBC to allow tech observers access to the backend to be able to tell if the system is free of manipulation. To avoid misinformation that was shared on social media platforms, KICTANet recommended that the IEBC leverage on various technologies to provide a single point of verified information and reduce the public information gap. www.cioafrica.co | OCTOBER 2022 | CIO Africa Magazine | by dx⁵ 13

people failed to use this and turned up in the wrong polling station or even the wrong county on the day. But overall, election observers seemed to feel that people who turned up to vote were able to do so, and that devices were able to communicate over the networks. The decentralised counting system means that each polling stream must count only 700 votes and then transmit them, so by midnight on the day of polling, over 98 per cent of forms 34A recording polling station presidential ballot counts, were publicly available on the IEBC portal. This then enabled election observers, media, and political groups to do their own counting and verify or predict the results that would be announced. Perhaps though the technology worked just too well with masses of polling forms arriving at IEBC website in a few hours leaving media houses rather swamped to collate the publicly available station tallies so that they strung out their analysis painfully slowly. Mainstream media have been strongly criticised for their failure to collate the results, either not deploying enough resources, or purposefully failing to complete a process that they started. However, online financial analysts Mwango Capital were the first to publish a complete transparent count projection compiled using form 34Bs that they had verified.

IEBC also made measures to use technology to improve accessibility for persons living with disabilities (PWDs). This area of ICT, known as assistive technology, has seen several innovative young companies come up with local solutions to help the lives of PWDs in Kenya. In this election IEBC partnered with Kenyan innovative start-up assistALL, to enable live translation for the deaf, in Kenya sign language, to help voters with hearing difficulties to participate in the elections. But now to the crux of the matter, this article dates to 2017 when allegations of hacking came into the successful petitions against the election results. In 2017, each party in the court defended their own cases as to whether the elections were free and fair, but nobody really stood up to defend the technology itself. Damage was done to the reputation of local data servers, the sleeping patterns of public cloud helpdesks in France, and a lot of confusion followed when it came to the regulatory and risk side of public v private cloud. Anticipating a repeat of the same, Kenya ICT Action Network (KICTANet) stepped up and formed a group of volunteers to be election technology observers. The volunteers went to ground to observe the deployment and operations at polling stations, while observing the internet and election web servers as well. Comprehensive reports have been posted on KICTANet website at the various stages of the election process. As was predictable, following the announcement of the very close election results, a series of petitions were presented to the Supreme Court, challenging the results of the presidential poll. As evidence and filings trickled in, affidavits detailed allegations of complex schemes to intercept, digitally modify, and then retransmit results, using back doors into the system exposed by alleged hackers. Upon seeing some of the evidence,

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leading experts were unanimous that documents, especially log files, presented to the court, did not seem to be what they were claimed to be. So, very rapidly, a new group was formed, the ICT expert Amicis Curiae, rapidly coopted out of the CIO Council, an informal collective of the top CIOs, CTOs and CISOs in Kenya, the crème d la crème of top tier tech leadership. Using online collaboration tools, the Amici quickly analysed all filings to the court that touched on technology. Reports were penned, and a robust discussion and peer review took place to very tight deadlines. The Friends of the Court filed their presentation represented by counsel and three volunteers from the CIO Council as petitioners, John Walubengo, CISA, CDPSE, (OGW), ICT Lecturer, Multimedia University of Kenya, Consulting Data Protection Officer (DPO) Ajua and Trustee at KICTAnet, former Industrial Engineer Dr Joseph Sevilla, the Director, @iLabAfrica and @iBizAfrica, and Martin Mirero, the CTO at up and rising start-up Ajua enjoined to take part in the case with their filings considered (and even paraphrased) by the judges of the Supreme Court of Kenya in reaching the verdict. “Upon considering the pleadings, submissions, and the ICT Scrutiny and Inspection, Tallying and Recount Report by the Registrar which fully examined the IEBC’s Result Transmission System (RTS), the Court was not persuaded that the technology deployed by IEBC failed the standard of Article 86(a) of the Constitution on integrity, verifiability, security and transparency.” However, this time it wasn’t just technology that was on trial. The basics of mathematics itself seemed under challenge. Although adding up 46,000 sets of four numbers is a process of very basic arithmetic, made easy and quick by modern computer processing power, press conferences and then court filings introduced a ‘new math’ working backwards from rounded percentages, that online Kenyan’s known as #KOT jokingly named as Mazematics. As the Supreme Court of Kenya stated, “The Court was satisfied that IEBC carried out the verification, tallying, and declaration of the Presidential Election results in accordance with Article 138 (3) (c) and (10) of the Constitution.”

With the courts clearing the good name of ICT, as well as Mathematics, one of the basic constructs of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), then we can get back to growing the ICT Industry in Kenya, though we now are mostly referring to ICT as ‘The Digital Economy,’ but in conclusion we can look at how the Digital Economy can further improve elections.

The Digital Economy Blueprint launched by President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2019 defined five pillars of the digital economy these being: - i). Digital government ii). Digital infrastructure iii). Digital business iv). Innovation driven entrepreneurship v). Digital skills and values. Digital infrastructure has made huge leaps in mobile coverage, local data centres, cloud edge accelerator nodes, enabling the whole IEBC process to work smoother and faster. A manifesto pledge from the new government will see Wi-Fi installed in all schools, which will further boost the connectivity options for many polling stations. Digital government systems have been key in elections for the last few years. We expect to see further harmonisation of digital government platforms and digital identity (re: Huduma Namba) which can only go further to making all government processes transparent and efficient.

In terms of innovation and entrepreneurship, it would be great to see more home-grown technology companies deliver solutions for the election process. But it may be a little ambitious to see Kenya follow the Venezuela example of growing a leading global election tech company like Smartmatic. But perhaps other elections in Africa and the world may be able to emulate the local innovation adopted by IEBC and its use of the assistALL translation app for the deaf voters.

Digital business in Kenya has transformed the way we order a taxi or get a pizza delivered. I am sure that the digitally enabled distribution tech companies in Kenya, using mobile apps or IoT, can help with future elections to improve the traceability and efficiency in delivering election materials. Digital skills and values go hand in hand. Prof Cheeseman in his article quoted John Githongo, Kenya’s former anticorruption tsar as saying, “You cannot digitise integrity.” There have been many a discussion about the expertise of our legal system when it comes to analysing complex ICT arguments, and to validate digital evidence such as log files. Hard discussions will be needed around that going forward, but it certainly should not be used as the Trojan Horse to bring back the soundly rejected ICT Practitioners Bill. Another manifesto pledge is to increase spending into science, technology, and innovation from 0.8 per cent to 2 per cent of the GDP, and this will certainly bring more tech savvy youth into the digital economy. But lastly, we must mention that Kenya has been one of the few countries in Africa that has undergone such controversial and contested elections with no disturbance, filtering, blocking, or shutting down of its internet. In #KOT language, Kenya #KeptitOn, and also managed to #KilltheICTBill in the same year! A free and accessible internet, in line with the principles on which the internet was developed, could not find a better home than Kenya. Independence of the regulator the Communications Authority of Kenya, as well as the strong leadership of Cabinet Secretary Joseph Mucheru, have ensured that Kenya remains probably the best country in Africa for ICT investment.