This archive report was first published on 19 May 2020.
On May 19, 2020, the IEBC uploaded a data report on the 2017 election outcome, only to pull it down after Kenyans pointed out basic errors, including winning candidates being mislabelled as belonging to a different party.
These mistakes reignited the debate about the credibility of Kenyan elections, which have been fiercely contested over the last fifteen years.
Instead of rehashing old cases, we should focus on what the IEBC could have done better in generating the report.
Firstly, the IEBC should have avoided using cut-and-paste methods to create a statistical report, which can lead to errors.
It's possible that the errors occurred due to a manual cut-and-paste job, rather than an attempt to cook the figures.
The elections figures were settled and submitted to court during the Presidential petition, and we shouldn't expect any changes.
What the IEBC should have done is to get their IT team to write logic that would extract, transform, and load the results from the database and paste them automatically into the Word-processed report.
Furthermore, the IEBC should have published the election results on the open data platform, allowing independent researchers to engage and interrogate the data independently.
The open data platform would have stored the data in a format that allows researchers to write their own logic to extract and generate insights around the 2017 elections.
By publishing the results in an open data format, the IEBC would have increased transparency and trust from citizens in their conduct of elections.
Additionally, the IEBC must begin to build local technical capacity to host and manage voter's data using local data centers, avoiding situations where data is outsourced to foreign destinations.
As we head into 2022, the IEBC must remember that the Kenyan Data Protection Act of 2019 restricts the outsourcing of citizen data to foreign destinations.
Mr. Walubengo is a lecturer at Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT.
