Murgor: Unauthorised people infiltrated IEBC systems, tampered with presidential results

While making his submissions in the Presidential Petition case at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Murgor, who is representing Raila Odinga and Martha Karua, noted that the technology was manipulated to give preconceived results.

“The technology deployed by IEBC for the conduct of the 2022 General Election completely failed the standards for a secure and transparent electronic voting system and thereby yielded aptly what has been described by my colleagues as non-verifiable, inaccurate and invalid results,” said Murgor.

“The technology was so inherently corrupted, manipulated and tainted that the results declared by Mr Chebukati cannot be, in an objective case, said to be representative of the true will of the Kenyan people.”

He further told the court that there was a lack of confidentiality in the entire process and that the election system was not “Simultaneous and progressive” as expected by the law.

According to the lawyer who wants the Supreme Court judges to overturn the results which saw William Ruto declared president-elect, the IEBC backend was accessed by unauthorised personnel in full knowledge of the electoral commission.

“The IEBC backend should have been accessed by only those legitimately authorised… There was a lack of security. The first instance is the operation and use of IEBC election materials and equipment by identified and unauthorised persons, and I am referring to the now-infamous Venezuelan nationals,” he submitted.

“Penetration by way of hacking and unauthorised grant of access to IEBC systems by known and unknown persons.”

“A result for [Dr. Ruto] was being arrived at well before the tally was in and each time work was being done to fit A and B into that result and at the end the result was forced onto Kenyans through a Form 34C,” he added.

Murgor told the seven-bench team led by Chief Justice Martha Koome that the Form 34C which IEBC Chairperson Wafula Chebukati had was generated several times even before the tallying exercise was complete.

“At any time you see a download of Forms 34A in the CSV format which is editable. As of August 12, 2022, 15:43:48 hrs, Form 34C had already been generated. The results were hardly in, according to IEBC. What was the business of anyone at that time generating a Form 34C?” he posed.

The lawyer further said that the same process went on and on until the results were announced on August 15.

Among the unauthorised people the Senior Counsel said gained access to the system is Chebukati’s personal assistant, Dickson Kwanusu.

“We in this court, if we hadn’t brought the logs, we would never have known that Mr Dickson Kwanusu had wide powers in this system, so whilst in this dispute we may not see the fingerprints of [Chebukati] in the ICT system, we see his palm, his much larger presence through the actions of his PA,” submitted the lawyer.

“Kwanusu performed a purported verification process of Forms 34A 1,743 times. The same scrutiny reveals that at 8:28, one Abdi Dahir who was not gazetted and who is belatedly granted access and privileges to the system purportedly verified 659 Forms 34A.”

Odinga was seeking to succeed President Uhuru Kenyatta with his running mate Karua, under the Azimio la Umoja One Kenya coalition party.

Chebukati declared Ruto as the winner of the presidential election after garnering 7,176,141 votes, representing 50.49 per cent of the total votes cast. Odinga came in second with 6,942,930 votes, which represents 48.85 per cent of the votes cast.

Odinga however rejected the results as “null and void” and went ahead to file a petition at the Supreme Court seeking to invalidate Ruto’s election.

The seven-member bench is set to determine the petition by September 5.