The NASA coalition has been accused of manipulating data to show opposition leader Raila Odinga won the August 8 presidential election.
In a five-part
series on his website, political historian Charles Hornsby illustrates how the data presented by NASA was manipulated to show Raila won.
Hornsby offers the disclaimer that he does not work for any Kenyan and is not insinuating that the IEBC results were the correct ones.
In his analysis, he uses the data that was released by NASA on January 26 to show inconsistencies and what did not make sense.
"The IEBC may not be telling the truth but NASA is definitely lying. Whether there is any genuine evidence that NASA won the election in existence somewhere is a question I can’t answer, but millions of Kenyans who honestly believed NASA’s claims have been done a deep disservice by this mendacious falsehood," he says.
Hornsby is one of the foremost western scholars on Kenya and African polical history and the author of
Kenya: A History Since Independence.
On January
26, the opposition presented a report on the results of the August 8 election, on which Raila Odinga's January 30 swearing-in was based.
"This is it. This is the document that contains results of the election in 2017, in which more than 80 per cent of Kenyans participated," Siaya senator and lawyer James Orengo said during the unveiling of their report.
Details:
The IEBC declared President Uhuru Kenyatta winner with
8,203,290 votes
against Raila's
6,762,224
but the ODM leader said he won by 1.4 million votes.
On January 26, Orengo said Raila got 8.1
million votes compared to Uhuru's 7.9
million.
The August 8 elections were nullified by the Supreme Court which said that the election was marred by illegalities and irregularities.
The ordered another election to be held. This was done on October 26 but NASA boyvotted the elections which Uhuru won and the win upheld by the Supreme Court.
'No authentic August election results'
In his , Hornsby concludes that he is now confident that NASA’s document does not contain the true and authentic August 2017 Presidential election results.
"Whether the IEBC’s presidential results were accurate is a different question, which I cannot answer here. The Supreme Court has already concluded that there were material procedural issues which left the results in question (though no-one demonstrated them to be systematically rigged), but I now know that NASA’s claimed results must be false."
He gives an example of Narok where the NASA summary matches the detail file, but his analysis shows the file is certainly fake.
"...and therefore so is the summary. Beginning with the overall results which NASA claim are authentic, a county-wide turnout of 96.8 per cent is ridiculous," Hornsby says.
He adds that in the detailed file, the coalition claimed turnouts were extraordinary everywhere and exceeded 99 per cent in 94 polling stations.
"In two polling stations, they reported an achievement Stalin would admire, a 101 per cent turnout with 620/616 votes voting in one station in Narok South and 442/438 in a station in Narok East," Hornsby details in his analysis.
He noted these turnouts are impossible in an ideal scenario.
"The IEBC turnout for the same election was a (still high) 83 per cent. But while Uhuru’s number in NASA's file is very similar to the IEBCs report, 52,000 more votes have appeared in Raila’s total at polling station level, spread across the polling stations."
More on poll outcome:
Also see:
'Extraordinarily high, semi-random numbers'
There are polling stations in the same county, as pointed out in his analysis, where candidates other than the top two all got zero votes.
"Again, we appear to have a 'he said, she said' problem of two competing realities, one of which is false. But which? However, a line-by-line perusal of the Narok results yielded new evidence sufficient to convince me that NASA's results are the fake," Hornsby says.
"Deep in the Narok file (on page 251 and for several pages after) there is an unmistakable smoking gun. Someone in NASA’s technical team forgot to randomise part of their file for the smaller candidates.
On page 251, in Narok West, we see zero entries for all the minor candidates for more than 50 polling stations in row."
He adds that
NASA's Narok results are a construct, not the organic result of an electoral process but created at least in part in a spreadsheet tool.
"I suspect we would find something similar in a number of other counties if we looked, knowing what to look for, but this is enough for me," Hornsby says.
In Turkana, Hornsby illustrates that the NASA data shows the opposition
added 7,000 votes to their own total in the summary. These numbers aren’t in the detail file containing the polling station data.
"For their data to be genuine, 16,000 Turkana people would have had to queue and vote for Raila, but refuse to vote for governor or for their MP, and another 20,000 would have had to vote for Jubilee in governor and MP but Raila in the presidency."
Hornsby saysthe only scenario he can come up with to explain this combination of extraordinarily high, semi-random numbers for Uhuru and Raila and (mostly) zeros for everyone else is that NASA used a blank extract or a real copy of IEBC data and then modified/filled in the data in some counties to make it appear that they won.
Hornsby ends his analysis by inviting people to factually challenge his opinion.
"...as I believe that argument and counterargument always takes us closer towards the truth. I have no brief from anyone and have been paid by no-one to do this, I just wanted to make sure that the truth was told, no matter what it turned out to be."