This archive report was first published on 23 July 2019.
On July 23, 2019, the Nation published an article by John Walubengo, a lecturer at Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT, raising concerns about the validity of electronic signatures collected for the Punguza Mizigo referendum.
Dr. Ekuru Aukot, an architect of the Constitution of Kenya 2010, had proposed the referendum bill, which aimed to correct various issues forced on Kenyans by the political class.
However, the process of collecting the required 1 million signatures has been questioned, with many wondering how Dr. Aukot managed to achieve this feat while other political giants, like NASA, failed in 2016.
According to a check on the Thirdway Alliance website, the page for collecting referendum petition signatures had expired and been removed, but a similar page was used to electronically collect signatures through the internet.
While this innovation is seen as a step in the right direction, experts argue that the manual signatures captured electronically do not technically become digital signatures, which are mathematical representations rather than pictorial representations of a voter's signature.
Moreover, the manual signatures acquired electronically have challenges when subjected to Article 86 of the Constitution, which requires a voting method to be simple, accurate, verifiable, secure, accountable, and transparent.
IEBC would be legally cornered if someone took them to court and tasked them to technically demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the signatures captured by Thirdway Alliance indeed came from the purported voter.
Experts argue that the insecurities surrounding the Internet as the medium of signature acquisition make it difficult to prove that a signature originated from a specific user or voter.
Despite these concerns, congratulations are in order to Thirdway Alliance for showing the strategic value ICT systems can provide to political processes.
It is now up to IEBC and other agencies to fine-tune this technology and mature it to the anticipated legal standards and thresholds.
