Kenya Orders Election Recount After Venezuelans Arrested for Alleged Hacking

Kenya’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a recount of ballots cast across 15 voting stations on August 9 during Kenya’s presidential election, Voice of America (VOA) reported.

The court issued the edict during its hearing of a formal challenge to the election’s result, which saw current Kenya Deputy President William Ruto declared the winner with 50.49 percent of the vote under circumstances disputed by competing presidential candidate Raila Odinga.

“The recount request from Raila Odinga and his running mate, Matha Karua, was for 15 polling stations in four counties: Kericho, Nandi, Nyandarua and Mombasa,” VOA reported, noting that the “recounts must be done within 48 hours” of August 30.

Raila Odinga was the presidential candidate for Kenya’s opposition Azimio la Umoja-One Kenya Coalition party in Kenya’s general election on August 9. Odinga’s legal team confirmed on August 22 that it filed a petition with Kenya’s Supreme Court in which he formally contested the election’s results. Kenya election commission chairman Wafula Chebukati declared Ruto the winner of the presidential election on August 15 with 50.49 percent of the vote, or by a narrow margin of roughly 230,000 votes. Four of the commission’s seven members “publicly disowned the results, citing issues with the counting process,” VOA recalled on Tuesday.

Odinga specifically alleged both in his Supreme Court petition and during a public speech on August 22 that Venezuelan nationals had interfered in Kenya’s August 9 general election. The opposition leader told a crowd of his supporters that his legal team had “enough evidence to show foreigners, those people from Venezuela, were brought into the country to try to steal our victory but it won’t be possible.”

Kenya’s the Nation newspaper published an excerpt of Odinga’s Supreme Court petition on August 22, which read:

Combined with the capability of the foreigners and anyone in possession of the contents and information in the electronic devices to remotely access and manipulate the entire IEBC data; and the manifest discrepancies and irregularities manifest during the General Election and the tallying, verification of count and declaration of the presidential election result; it is the inevitable conclusion that not only was the presidential election not secure, it is not verifiable, accountable, neutral or transparent.

Kenyan authorities arrested three Venezuelan citizens at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in late July after customs officials found Kenyan election materials inside their suitcases. The Venezuelan nationals, who have yet to be named, flew to Nairobi from Istanbul, Turkey.

Wafula Chebukati, the chairman of Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), claimed that the three Venezuelans detained at Nairobi’s airport in July were “contracted by IEBC to provide support on behalf of Smartmatic International, the company contracted to provide electoral management technology by the commission,” the Nation reported on August 29.

“Smartmatic, the Greek company that won the tender to run the all-encompassing Kenya Integrated Elections Management Systems (Kiems), also insisted that three Venezuelans arrested at the airport with election kit stickers in their luggage were their full-time employees through a subsidiary company,” the newspaper observed separately on August 22.

The preliminary results of a Kenyan national police investigation obtained by the Nation on August 29 revealed that “[d]etectives who have been on the case since July now believe that was not the case,” referring to the IEBC and Smartmatic’s claims that the three Venezuelans were official contractors for the two entities.

Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) determined in recent days that the three Venezuelan nationals had illegal access to IEBC servers five months prior to Kenya’s general election on August 9, according to the Nation‘s August 29 report.