Eric Gumbo is one of the advocates representing IEBC in the presidential petition that is ongoing at the Supreme court of Kenya.
Gumbo presented his submissions on whether the system that was used to transmit election results was secure among other issues while making reference to various affidavits.
According to him, the system was very secure and there is no way a third party could have interfered with the transmission of results as alleged by petitioners.
“That KIEMs gadget works in specific ways. First it is locked to a specific polling station meaning you can not then use it once you have locked it to the events of that day to transmit results from a different station for purposes of that election,” Gumbo said.
The advocate added that the entire network is secured by double firewalls making it difficult for hackers to interfere with results and it would have required them to have the total number of voter turnout in polling stations to manipulate the results.
Regarding the issue of individuals who are claimed to have accessed the system with the aim of interfering with results, Gumbo noted that the people who were mentioned were IEBC officials. He added that some other log in details mentioned in several affidavits had been fabricated as some had been picked from the 2017 elections.
“Abdidahir Maalim was one of the returning officers duly gazette for purposes of this election. He then had access limited to the area he was covering. That therefore is an authorized person, he said.
Maalim was mentioned in Raila Odinga’s petition as one of the rogue IEBC officials.
Gumbo further explained why the Venezuelans who caused a lot of uproar in the country had access to the system.
“There is the heavy weather that was made about the Venezuelans, a specific name has been dropped of one Gaetano Omar. My ladies and my lords, the contract between Smartmatic and IEBC was for the supply and maintenance of the infrastructure that they had. It then meant that they had to bring in their personnel to manage or monitor the smooth running of that system.
“Before the elections, these people were all logged out of the system and on the date of the elections, none of the people were in the system even for purposes of that maintenance,” Gumbo explained.
He further noted that it would make a lot of sense if the petitioners would point out how the system interfered with each of the persons that they are claiming was involved.
“It is not enough to say Gumbo was found in the system because what matters here is the allegation around manipulation and alteration of the results, if we do not get into this base, what exactly are we talking about,” the advocate argued.
He noted that the individuals were granted access to the system, in order to fix any issues there might have been since they could not solve them while not logged in.
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