Kenya Elections: IEBC Launches Probe Into System Hacking Accusation

Kenya’s electoral body on Wednesday promised to verify whether the claims on system hacking made by the opposition presidential candidate was true or not.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chairman, Wafula Chebukati said during a press conference that investigation has been launched to look into the possible hacking of its systems and will continue verifying vote tallies from 290 constituencies before declaring results within five days.
The voting of Kenya’s presidential election officially ended at 17:00 Tuesday. Votes counting continued till early Wednesday, with a result showing incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta taking the lead.
Kenya opposition presidential candidate Raila Odinga made a statement at 02:00 Wednesday claiming that the electronic-transporting result did not synchronize with the artificially-confirmed form and rejected the poll results.
At 10:00, Odinga made another announcement that the electoral commission’s computer system was hacked to manipulate the election results, leading to the 11 percent margin between the top two candidates.
The electronic vote-counting system did not interrupt by Odinga’s announcements, but the update rate of the voting results was slowed down. Meanwhile, small riots broke out in cities, including Kisumu and Mombasa to protest against the “fake” polling result.
Chebukati called on voters to calm down and made responses to the opposition’s questionings at the press conference Wednesday afternoon in the capital Nairobi.
“The system，whether it’s hacked or not，those are aspersions which have been cast, those are allegations. As a commission, we shall have our own investigative system to kick in. We shall come up with a methodology as to finding out whether or not those claims are correct,” said Chebukati.
Till Thursday, data on the IEBC website showed that 39,541 polling stations, up to 96.63 percent of the total number, had finished counting votes.
Currently, Kenyatta stands at 54.32 percent, while Odinga is at 44.8 percent.