IEBC: NASA Evidently Blowing Smoke, Has No Smoking Gun

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has opposed demands by Raila Odinga and Kalonzo Musyoka to have “unfettered” access to the Commission’s servers.

Odinga and Musyoka also want the court to order IEBC allow them access to the original Form 34As and Bs in the 40,883 polling stations and 290 constituencies.

In the pre-trial hearing on Saturday, IEBC legal team made a concession where the forms are concerned, they argued that the petitioners’ request to access both the servers and systems were impractical to achieve in the limited constitutional timelines, provided for the hearing and determination of a presidential petition.

Raila's legal team, however,led by Senior Counsel James Orengo said they would take no more than a few hours to scrutinise the forms and carry out a forensic audit on the servers and systems but gave varying time estimations.

“For example for Form 34B, if I’m given 30 minutes, I’ll be able to tell you right from the outset,” Orengo first said before later changing it to one hour. “Even those thirty minutes will be appropriate and enough to expose this fraud,” he later said in a reversal when taken to task.

IEBC and President Kenyatta’s legal teams led by Paul Muite and Fred Ngatia respectively, said NASA request to access the servers and documents was not only unorthodox but counter to legal practice, which would allow the petitioners to introduce new evidence, when their case was already filed.

“They’re seeking enlargement of time, to introduce that evidence, outside the stipulated seven days within which the petition should have been filed.”

“That evidence is inadmissible as a matter of law, because the petition and the supporting evidence go hand in hand,” IEBC legal team submitted.

“In fact it’s in the public domain, at one point they even gave us the time of hacking,” IEBC lawyer Paul Muite recalled.