From ... in Information Technology Political Surveillance Propaganda Scandal — Mar 4, 2025

Kenya’s problems with electronic voting methods continue

An audit has found that more than 200 biometric election devices linked to the Kenya Integrated Elections Management System (“KIEMS”) have gone missing and cannot be accounted for. These devices are crucial for voter authentication during e

We have tagged this article as propaganda as it imposes a serious spin on the topic.
If not more explanation provided, this article is included as propaganda because it shows clear manufacture from a government controlled dialectic, where a topic is misdirected by some actors in order to mislead people during early stages of a narrative.

During a President’s Cabinet Meeting last month, US President Donald Trump called for various reforms in US elections. “We have to get to honest elections. We have to go back to paper ballots. We have to go back to voter ID. One-day election, ideally,” he said.

For anyone aware of the controversies surrounding the 2020 US presidential elections, President Trump’s statement makes perfect sense. It is perhaps advice that Kenya should follow as well.

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Electronic Devices are Stolen Ahead of August 2022 Elections

During the elections held in August 2022, the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (“KIEMS”) biometric kits were unable to read the fingerprints of registered voters in many of the polling stations.

With the glitches, many of the voters had to get their identity verified from manual voter registers. The IEBC only decided to make available printed manual registers for the elections just days before the polls, following pressure from some political leaders and a ruling by the High Court in Nairobi.

However, The Nation reported that it documented many instances in which voters were turned away from polling stations by IEBC staff because they were unable to be identified biometrically.

In the early hours of the voting, some leaders heavily criticised the IEBC, calling on the body to resort to manual verification of voters, rather than wasting time on the failing KIEMS kits.

Read more: Voters face biometric verification kit glitches in Kenya elections, failures ‘not widespread’, Biometric Update, 10 August 2022

The National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) later discovered that 125 Electronic Voter Identification Devices (“EVID”) laptops, 952 Biometric Voter Registration (“BVR”) kits and 1,325 hard disks had been stolen from the IEBC warehouse ahead of the August 2022 elections.

“This loss is so huge that it may have been an inside job. Because how do you steal 952 Evid laptops from one warehouse? Only a Canter (small lorry) can carry such a large number of laptops. I get the feeling that IEBC was not in control,” Mr Mbadi said, adding, “so how safe is an election in this country?”

Allegations that the stolen equipment was used to interfere with the elections were denied by the IEBC which said the EVID laptops were obsolete and BVR kits posed minimal risk to the election process. Besides, the IEBC had transitioned to KIEMS making the lost equipment irrelevant to the credibility of future elections.

Read more: Kenya: Stolen Election Kits Didn’t Interfere With 2022 Polls – IEBC CEO Marjan, All Africa, 16 March 2023

KIEMS Devices Go Missing

Today, Biometric Update reported that 200 devices linked to KIEMS cannot be accounted for according to a recent audit report.

The KIEMS system is made up of a laptop that is attached with a fingerprint reader and a handheld device with an in-built fingerprint reader. The system identifies voters biometrically. KIEMS also has the biometric voter registration system that was used to electronically capture voters’ facial images, fingerprints and civil data. It creates information that supports a voter’s identification on voting day.

The KIEMS also has a system that enables presiding officers to present and transmit results to observation centres through specially configured mobile devices. The mobile phone devices aid the simultaneous transmission of tallied results to the constituency, county and national final tallying centres.

The audit report reveals that despite the IEBC officially reporting only two missing KIEMS kits, about 30 of the devices were damaged in election-related violence in 2022, while approximately 159 others deployed for by-elections never returned to IEBC from the polling stations.

The Auditor General, Nancy Gathungu, has blamed the IEBC for not having a robust mechanism to effectively track and manage the deployment of the kits, resulting in a cumulative total of about 4,000 electronic devices not fully accounted for following the elections of 2017 and 2022.

The country had procured a combined 59,100 KIEMS kits for the two elections from Idemia and Smartmatic, and according to the IEBC’s policy, these devices are supposed to be returned to a central warehouse in Nairobi for storage and reconfiguration after being sent to the field.

The missing KIEMS devices have sparked concerns about the safety and integrity of future elections, as they contain biometric data and software that enables results transmission, and leaving the equipment in unauthorised hands could be a major concern in subsequent polls if these people are seeking to manipulate election results.

The issue of missing KIEMS kits adds to the IEBC’s existing concerns, including a supplementary budget slash that is expected to affect its preparations for the 2027 general elections, with the IEBC Chief Executive Officer, Marjan Hussein Marjan, stating that the budget cut will impact payments for licenses and maintenance of the KIEMS kits.

What none of these reports seem to be concerned with is the theft and misuse of personal data that is on the electronic devices that have been stolen or gone missing.

Featured image: Kenya: Avoiding Another Electoral Crisis, International Crisis Group, 3 March 2017

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