Why we nullified Uhurus win: Supreme Court

Supreme Court judges have on Wednesday delivered the full judgment nullifying the August 8 presidential poll after concluding that the electoral commission failed to electronically transmits results and that the poll was neither transparent nor verifiable.

Deputy Chief Justice Philomena Mwilu read the majority judgment said the Supreme Court judges concluded that the IEBC election transmission system was compromised and data interfered with.

In the detailed judgment, DCJ Mwilu said the judges concluded that the interference led to nullification of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s win.

“Although Kenyans turned up in large numbers to vote on election day, after the voting, everything went opaque. Whether the third respondent received largest number of votes is irrelevant,” read DCJ Mwilu.

The judges said the failure by the IEBC to provide access to its servers and logs, denied petitioners and the court a chance to verify information in the IEBC servers, hence their determination that the election was bungled.

“Access was only provided on the August 29, 2017 without ability to access the logs or even view them. The exercise was therefore a complete violation of the court order and the access was not useful to the parties or the court,” ruled the judges.

“ It is clear from the above that IEBC in particular failed to allow access to two critical areas of their servers. Its logs which could have proved or disproved the petitioner’s claims of hacking into the servers,” she added.

“Our order of scrutiny was a golden opportunity for IEBC to discredit petitioner’s claims but they disobeyed the court order.”

The Supreme Court judges faulted IEBC officials for failing to transmit results from all polling stations due to lack of 3G network despite spending large sums of money to procure satellite phones.

“The excuse that some areas had no 3G or 4G can’t be accepted. IEBC and its chair did not verify the results before declaring the winner and there is no explanation as to why the primary document 34 A was completely disregarded…Failure to verify the results went against expectation of the constitution,” ruled the judges.