IEBC's lawyer Paul Muite speaking during the pre-trial conference of the presidential poll petition at the Supreme Court on August 26, 2017. [PHOTO/nation.co.ke]
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has dismissed NASA's claims that the commission's systems were hacked to give President Uhuru Kenyatta a win in the general elections.
Through senior counsel Paul Nyamodi, the commission downplayed the significance NASA placed on forms 34A to declare presidential results and further insisted that these were not mandatory.
In what looked like an attack on the Court of Appeal ruling which declared that presidential results announced at constituency tallying centres would be final, Nyamodi said the significance of the said forms were muted and IEBC’s right to announce provisional results taken away.
He described NASA's petition as vague with nuanced complaints against IEBC's electronic transmission system.
“It was like a bus. It was a like a matatu. It was like a courier. All it did was transport the result from one place to another,” Mr Nyamodi said.
“The petitioner remains obsessed with the mode of conveyance. What was conveyed was either through Kiems, Form 34A, or through FTP, Form 34B.
“Forms 34A are not mandatory for the chairman of the commission to declare the winner in the presidential race. The decision to declare Mr Kenyatta as the winner was done within the law because all forms 34B had been received.”
Over the transmission of results, Nyamodi asked the court to refer to the Appellate Court’s ruling which declared that primary instrument for making declarations in the presidential polls was forms 34B, which summed all results garnered by presidential candidates at the polling stations.