Do you remember the Raila Odinga-led NASA claiming that they were denied access to IEBC servers during the past 2017 polls? Do you believe this was true? Well, the Wafula Chebukati-led IEBC has reignited the election servers controversy, saying the National Super Alliance lied to Kenyans that its experts were denied access.
In its internal post-evaluation report, IEBC claims Nasa accessed the servers 34 times through one John Walubengo before the August 8, 2017 poll results were released.
This was after making 54 attempts, 20 of them unsuccessful.
The commission says, on the other hand, Jubilee had 10 successful logins after 24 attempts.
This was through ex-Energy CS Davis Chirchir.
Nasa had claimed that Chirchir, a former IEBC official and a tech expert, hacked the IEBC servers and helped Jubilee to rig the polls.
The claims featured prominently in the presidential petition at the Supreme Court especially after the IEBC failed to open its servers as ordered by the judges.
In the new report, the IEBC says Collins Ndindi, an independent candidate, made 46 attempts to log into the servers but only six succeeded.
Japheth Kaluyu’s agent had three successful logins while UDP’s Ben Wafuko opened the database six times.
Thirdway Alliance’s Bildad Kagai got five successful logins, the report states.
The IEBC has also dismissed claims that it defied the apex court. The commission says it granted parties access to the information system as ordered.
But Nasa had argued that they were denied access within the 48 hours provided for by the court to verify claims of data manipulation. This was the bone of contention during the Supreme Court proceedings.
The IEBC, at the time, raised objections citing confidentiality in regard to the application for unrestricted access to the servers.
Nasa had sought to be provided with details of usernames, passwords, the location of servers, identity of password holders, IP addresses and the software.
The Supreme Court made fresh orders for read-only access to the information related to the servers, cognizant of the security concerns raised by IEBC.
“Upon receipt of the orders, the commission made efforts to expedite the orders as soon as it was practically possible,” the 265-page report reads in part.
The IEBC says it provided information to the number of servers in its possession, firewalls, operating system, password policy, password matrix, system user types and disaster recovery plan.
Other details provided to the petition parties were certified copies of penetration tests, polling station GPS locations, a certified list of all KIEMS kits, polling station allocation for each KIEMS kit, partnership agreements for the election technology and pre-downloaded login trails.
The commission further reports that all the parties accepted all the information as provided.
The IEBC says Nasa’s argument stemmed from their insistence that they couldn’t trust whether the information was from the commission’s servers or from an unverified source, hence their request for login access.