After a difficult 2020 in which he and his supporters were severely tested, a resurgent William Samoei Ruto remains the strongest candidate to win Kenya's 2022 presidential election. He has the full support of the Kalenjin Rift Valley (and will win even Baringo County), solid backing in the eight counties of central Kenya, less clear but still strong support in the northern and southern pastoralists (though the Somali remain aloof at the moment) and growing presence on the Coast. He has no support amongst the Luo (who remain completely committed to Raila Odinga) and only footholds in the Luhya and Kamba. 

Retiring incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta's recent strategy has mimicked that of his old patron Daniel arap Moi. To avoid Kenya becoming ungovernable, he reached out in March 2018 to agree a "handshake" with his bitter opponent, which brought Odinga, his allies and the Luo community into a loose alliance, designed to ensure stability and with promises of future benefits (just as Moi did with Raila in 1998). He did not expect that the result would be a catastrophic rupture in the governing Jubilee alliance as his powerful, driven, manipulative Deputy President Ruto refused to accept that Kenyatta would no longer deliver on their deal of "Kumi yangu, Kumi ya Ruto" (10 years for Uhuru, 10 for Ruto) and sought the kingdom on his own terms. What Uhuru promised Raila in return for his support in 2018 has never been revealed, but it seems Uhuru has followed in Moi's footsteps in more ways than one, since for the last three years he has refused to offer clear direction on future leadership, neither endorsing Raila as his successor, nor preferring another, promising all things to all people and delaying any commitment to the last minute. Enmeshed in legal disputes over the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) and many other constitutional issues, he appears unable to offer a clear way forward, preferring instead to prop up an uneasy alliance of his old opponents while denigrating and administratively harassing his own Deputy President Ruto and his supporters. Meanwhile, without a strong number two in the central region, able to bring the community into a new 2022 alliance as a Vice-President, much of his original bedrock of support in the Kikuyu Embu and Meru has leached away to Ruto, feeling abandoned both economically and politically by their once-loved President.

But while Uhuru is a "lame duck" and a political liability in much of his home region, nationwide everything still depends on the elite "dance" under way. Nothing is settled.​ At least a dozen of Kenya's counties remain impossible to predict, and politicians everywhere are declaring their candidatures for elected seats while avoiding any admission of the political party under whose brand they plan to contest. As in 2007, pro-government candidates are uncertain whether the governing Jubilee will even compete under that name, merge with ODM or jump to another newly-minted party entirely. And Ruto has only recently settled on the United Democratic Alliance (UDA) as his political vehicle and UDA is a political party on paper only, its sole purpose being to elect its leader and founded on the extraordinary (and unexplained) wealth of its 54-year old, "hustler" creator.

b Source: analysis of the behaviour and alliances of individual Kenyan politicians since 2019, leavened with byelection results and historical precedent.
​
A united Raila/Kikuyu establishment/Musalia Mudavadi/Kalonzo Musyoka/Gideon Moi alliance would beat Ruto decisively, but that is near-impossible. Both Musyoka and Mudavadi have backed Raila before, without success. And Raila seems determined on one more try, though he is weaker going into this election season than in any of the last three contests. A three- or four-way split with Raila, Mudavadi and Musyoka all standing would guarantee a victory for Ruto, who has a solid 30% of the nationwide vote today, and would sweep up many undecided voters. This is assuming that the elections were free and fair, which cannot be taken for granted. And if Ruto were rigged out (hard to do, but not impossible), I believe parts of the Rift Valley would burn.

As long as Raila is determined to stand for the fifth time, Ruto's chances are good, since it is extremely unlikely that Musyoka and Mudavadi would both back Raila again. Ruto's core support base is now bigger than Raila's and a Raila presidency is anathema in central Kenya and will force the Kikuyu en masse into Ruto's arms, re-establishing under new leadership the Kikuyu-Kalenjin alliance which won victory in 2013 and 2017 (see first figure).

It is also too late to build up a fresh, compromise candidate with a nationwide support base. Cabinet secretary Fred Matiang'i appeared an option a couple of years ago, but while effective in government he remains a technocrat not a politician, and that idea seems to have faded. It would be hard to "pump up" Matiang'i or an alternative candidate now, unless all the other players immediately backed them against Ruto. 

As a Ruto-beater, Mudavadi is the best compromise candidate, with a reasonable ethnic base and a broader nationwide brand than Musyoka. A presidentially plausible figure without too many skeletons in the closet, he could be backed by Odinga, Kenyatta and Musyoka (see second figure). Indeed, it is often forgotten that Uhuru backed Mudavadi for the presidency for a few short days in December 2012, before denouncing the deal he himself had signed because "the devil made me do it".

Following a question from a friend about the 2017 results, I decided to do a deep-dive into how well Kenya's elected MPs have done in each subsequent general election since independence. I have been collecting and maintaining a record of every Kenyan MP since 1963 and every contest in which they participated. This can be used – amongst other things – to answer basic question on electoral success and elite refreshment which probably cannot be answered anywhere else.

This analysis looks only at elected constituency and district/county MPs, Senators and Governors. Party list and individual nominees are excluded throughout. All by-elections are taken into account, so the data set is reasonably complete (I'm missing one MP in a couple of years, but it is not material).

The results since independence are as follows:

Beginning with 1969, in that election only 35% of the 158 incumbents elected in 1963 or thereafter were returned by voters. The previous six years had been a period of great change, and the candidates that had been selected by KANU, KADU and the APP in 1963 and then elected on party tickets were facing very different expectations and demands, with a single-party unicameral system, compared to the multi-party bicameral one at independence. Eight MPs (in dark blue above) were in prison, as the KPU had just been banned and Odinga and his close allies jailed without trial.

By 1974,  with the political system far more stable and President Kenyatta's rule unchallenged, the proportion of incumbents re-elected rose to 47%. In 1979, it rose even further, to 49%. This was perhaps surprising as it was the first year in office of President Moi, but the competitive first past-the-post system in a no-party state now had it own dynamic, and without extensive rigging, Moi's attempts to drive change were not always successful locally. This was even more notable in the snap election of 1983, when insurgents had less time to prepare their campaigns. Rather than cleansing the political system of his opponents,  the 1983 election saw the highest proportion of incumbents re-elected of any election. 1988, the extensively rigged queue-voting elections, saw greater change with just under half of MPs re-elected and a tranche of little known and unpopular placemen installed.

In 1992, with the restoration of multi-party democracy, most of the 'class of 88' were evicted. The changeover was the most fundamental of any election, with only a quarter of incumbents managing the bridge the transition between two systems and a complete new class of politicians entering the "system". In 1997, Moi's last election, the proportion rose once more, to 41%. In 2002, the transitional election which KANU and Uhuru Kenyatta lost, it rose further to 44%. (It seems that long-term the Kenyan political system trends towards a 40-45% re-election rate barring exceptional circumstances). In 2007, the strong performance of ODM candidates and the complex multi-party competitions within the PNU alliance resulted in a sharp fall, to only 34% of incumbents returned. Two-thirds of the MPs in January 2008 had not been there at the dissolution.

In contrast, 2013 was the first election under the second republic, with the number of political offices available doubled, with more constituencies, senators, elected women's representatives (reserved seats for women elected at county level) and governors all up for grabs. Virtually no-one quit after losing the party primaries and virtually all politicians tried to be elected somewhere. 78 out of the 210 incumbent MPs tried to become Senators, Governors, Presidents and Vice-Presidents. The majority lost, but 30 successfully made the transition to the Senate or Governorship. No incumbent tried to become a women’s representative, the county-level role reserved for female politicians as a gender equality affirmative action initiative. The 16 elected female MPs at the dissolution in 2013 all decided to stay with their constituency or become governors or senators.

By 2017, with the bicameral system and the party fault-lines stabilising and the roles of the various offices better understood, reelection rates would have been expected to rise. In fact, there was still a lot of shifting around, with both Senators and MPs trying to become Governors, now clearly the dominant political posts outside the executive presidency. Re-election rates fell slightly to 42%, as much due to intra-party primary elections as the final contest (this considers a MP who successfully becomes a Governor as for example “re-elected”).  

Diving deeper into the 2017 numbers:

• None of the 47 governors decided to move elsewhere or retired. Just under half (47%) were re-elected. Of the 22 victors, 18 were elected by the same party (assuming Jubilee equals 20013's TNA, URP and New Ford Kenya combined). Two changed sides and two were elected for different parties in the same alliance.
  
• Of the 290 elected MPs at the dissolution, must stuck to the lower house. Four tried to become senators, 19 to become governors. Four were elected as governors and four to the senate.
  
• The 46 Senators in contrast abandoned the upper chamber en masse, with more than half not seeking re-election at all. 17 moved “up” to try for the governorship of their county, one moved "down" to try to become an MP once more. 6 were elected as governors. Politicians were obviously unhappy with the powers and privileges of the Senatorial role, further evidence that the Senate as currently constituted is unsustainable long term.
  
• Amongst the 47 women's representatives from reserved seats, four moved "up" to try to be an MP, while one tried to be a senator, but very few made it back – the lowest of any grouping at only 28%. Voter dissatisfaction with their 2013 choices was very clear, probably because the  role not well understood then, competition for the party nominations had been light and party ticket voting had then dominated.
  
• Finally we saw 14 incumbents not standing at all. This was a new phenomenon, mostly the result of a what is referred to as "negotiated democracy" in the semi-arid and arid north-east. In the run up to the polls, Somali (and to a lesser Boran) clan elders had debated publicly and selected their slates of candidates for seats, or negotiated alliances with other clans to create a combined slate. Many of those not selected by the elders - including five incumbent MPs - duly stood down to allow other clan-mates to replace them, rather than risking splitting the clan vote and allowing the "other side" in.
  

As always, this analysis is unpaid and produced for no purpose other than to inform. Your comment are welcome !

I finally finished the deep-dive of last week and redid the party and ethnic analysis for all 289 constituency MPs elected on 8 August 2017 (see previous blog posts). I then compared the results against the 2009 Kenya census population figures by reported ethnicity.

The resulting figure shows both how each community split between the two main alliances, and how well those communities did in the 2010 constituency boundary redefinition and in winning elections in the growing number of multi-ethnic constituencies in the country.

The results are shown here:

For clarity, I have coloured all the pro-Jubilee teams blue and all the pro-NASA teams orange. There were a very few MPs who campaigned as genuinely independent or refused to declare publicly who they backed, saying "party politics had no place" in their seat, mainly in the Gusii and Kamba. They are coloured grey.

What we can see from this picture is:

1. Most larger communities plumped hard for one team or the other, and as a result, their parliamentary parties show the same pattern. Every single Kikuyu, Embu, Meru, Mbeere and Tharaka MP is in Jubilee (or was a pro-Jubilee post-primary defector) and every single Luo or Basuba MP is in NASA (or  was a post-ODM primary independent). Ethnicity and party preference are completely aligned in an uncomfortably close way in these communities.

2. It was striking how well the Kalenjin community did in terms of constituency representation in their homelands, and in winning seats in the multi-ethnic rift (and even one seat in Nairobi). The Oromo-speaking communities can clearly be seen to have been allocated more constituencies than their population would strictly require, because of their vast size and district historical identities. The Kikuyu community are almost exactly "right" (17.3% of elected MPs with 17.2% of the 2009 population), while the Luhya, Luo, Kamba, Gusii and Meru all ended up slightly "under-represented" in the current lower house amongst elected constituency MPs. 

The elected Women Representatives will - when added - follow a similar pattern, but because of their allocation by counties they will further strengthen the over representation of the semi-arid historically pastoral communities.

(As always, this work has been done without reward or partisan objective, but purely to encourage informed discussion)

For comparison to my previous post on Jubilee, I now report out on a second analysis of the ethnic background of the 62 elected ODM constituency MPs. This excludes (for now) members elected under other parties (Wiper, ANC, FORD-Kenya, CCM etc.), minor pro-Raila parties (KNC, CCU) and pro-Raila independents. It also excludes (so far) the ODM Women’s Representatives and the ODM nominated MPs.

As you would expect, the Luo (and linked Abasuba) community dominate ODM’s ranks, making up 44% of elected constituency MPs, with the Luhya and Mijikenda joint second, both with 10 MPs (16% each). The circa 40 other ethnic communities currently identified as such made up the remaining 24%.

ODM has no Kikuyu, Embu, Mbeere, Meru or Tharaka MPs, and also no Kalenjin, Kamba, Oromo (Borana, Gabbra, Orma) or Kuria. Layering on the MPs from the other three remaining “NASA” parties (Wiper, ANC and FORD-Kenya) that picture would change significantly.

There was one MPs whose ethnicity was unclear to me, Bady Twalib in Jomvu in Mombasa. He could be Swahili/Shirazi, Arab or even (much less likely) Mijikenda. Comments and corrections always welcome.

I was wondering to myself (following a recent related question from a friend about where Jubilee MPs might stand on the Ruto succession) what the ethnic composition of the current crop of elected Jubilee MPs in fact might be.

This is the answer, looking only (for now) at elected constituency MPs who were formally Jubilee candidates, and excluding so far fellow-traveller independents, KANU MPs, all the elected Women’s Representatives and party nominees.

As expected, the results follow the ethnic lines of support nationwide, with numbers driven by community voting preferences and the number of constituencies allocated to each region of the country (itself driven very roughly by the population of the Counties according to the 2009 census, shown for comparison).

 My records suggest that Kikuyu, Embu, Mbeere, Meru and Tharaka MPs make up 59 of the 140 elected Jubilee MPs (42%), Kalenjin MPs (26%), with all the other communities in the country the remaining 32%. Amongst predominantly opposition-supporting communities, Jubilee had elected Luhya, Kamba, Mijikenda and Gusii MPs but no Luo, Basuba, Taita or Teso.

The unknowns for me are the Lamu East MP Shariff Athman Ali (who I have provisionally placed as Swahili or Barawa) and Ali Amin Deddy in Laikipia East, a Moslem MP representing a mixed but Kikuyu-dominated seat, about whom I know nothing. Queries and corrections welcome as ever.

One still-unanswered question relating to the August 2017 Kenyan general elections - a frequent source of opposition concern and a pseudo-justification for NASA's fake results – is “whatever happened to the KIEMS electronic results that the IEBC had in their possession before the official results were announced?”.

It is mostly well-understood that the Form 34As, Bs and C constituted the formal election results, and that the parallel electronic transmission and display system - which was a legal requirement as a control check and verification mechanism - did not constitute the official record of the election. But we know that the vast majority of the KIEMS devices worked (because we saw the portal being updated moment-by-moment) so there was a central polling station-by-polling station record somewhere of the electronic transmissions (represented by the red “Results” below). That data has never been released (as an excel, pdf or anything else), though the display portal had something derived from it in a different format for several months.

Slightly oversimplified, this summarises the process as I understand it and highlights two issues in red:

James Orengo and other NASA figures have been asking for this transmission data for months, claiming that it would show a different set of numbers to those in the portal. I believe that this is correct, though not for the reason they give. Even without assuming malpractice, the portal began to be fed purely with electronic transmissions, but as the election continued and paper forms started streaming in, IEBC officials updated the portal with the official paper results and filled in missing stations which had never submitted an electronic return, which is why the total kept changing for several days.

But there was a record, somewhere, polling station by station, of what came in from the KIEMS kits. Why might it be the case that the IEBC can’t or won’t release this data? It would of course be incomplete, as some stations never got their KIEMS Kits working, or they failed part-way though, while others would have results different from the forms for reasons such as tired clerks mistyping, but that is surely no obstacle to release?

One reason could be that the data set is entirely different, and the portal was indeed rigged, as NASA claim. But this was always implausible because the election results were declared based on paper forms, not the portal results. The paper forms were produced by the 290 constituency returning officers. There would be no point in rigging the portal if the forms were different, as it would have no effect on the actual results and it would be obvious that it had been done. We repeatedly checked the paper forms against the portal during the election and they always matched very closely.

[As an aside, the Supreme Court instructed that access to various data be offered the NASA petitioners on 28 August, but for reasons known only to the Commission, some of the court-ordered requirements were not met. Perhaps surprisingly, given NASA's later "open the servers" campaign, the SC did not require the IEBC to give access to the actual electronic results transmissions, only to the locations of each KIEMS kit, log-in records to the portal and access to scanned and physical forms].

So, why not release it? Another possible reason might be that it would show just how often the KIEMS systems failed and officials went fully manual, which might allow observers to triangulate specific polling stations and then look for patterns in those stations of unusually high votes for one candidate. Or perhaps that some results were materially amended on the paper forms but correct electronically (though on a sample basis they have not been found  by anyone in checks). But surely from the perspective of the IEBC's leadership's credibility, that is a reason to release it, not to hide it?

And there are not one but two missing data sets

The second data set is a record of the means by which voters voted in a particular polling station, containing in the electronic voter identification system (EVID) return for each polling station (marked in red as Statistics). That shows how many people were identified and how that process took place (but not of course how they voted).

In the October 2017 presidential rerun, which Odinga boycotted, the IEBC was willing to release a download from the electronic systems, which I got a chance to copy. This showed for each polling station by what means people had been identified before being allowed to vote. It looked like this:

Quite a bit of analysis was done on that data set in October-November 2017, looking for patterns as to why fingerprint voting was not universal and confirming exactly what Document and Alphanumeric search really meant. We were looking for evidence of mass voting by non-fingerprinted voters, which would suggest local officials allowed stuffing or topped up votes for their favoured candidate after polls closed. We concluded that the data set made sense in general, that there was prima facie evidence of malpractice in a very few constituencies, but no pattern of by-passing the EVID tool nationwide.

These were the numbers for the percentage of voters not identified using fingerprint authentication (by any one of the three possible methods) in October, by constituency nationwide:

Elsewhere in the country, though, where voting did occur despite the boycott, there was no pattern of large numbers bypassing the electronic systems – 97.2% of voters were eventually biometrically identified. In other words, the (very modest) pro-Kenyatta turnouts in October 2017 were plausible.

So, given it could be produced in October, why has IEBC (or OT-Morpho, the service provider) not released the same station by station analysis for August? This question was asked of an IEBC Commissioner and elicited the response: “We had requested for the data on the 8 August election but did not get it from Safran [OT Morpho].”  

But is this true, or is it just a cover story because release would raise more questions that it would answer? OT Morpho (which has gone through several ownership changes in the last few years) is itself under some suspicion, particularly as it has since been disbarred by the World Bank for procurement corruption in Bangladesh.

Would release of the data show large-scale bypass of fingerprinting in certain constituencies, which might suggest top-up stuffing for Uhuru and the Jubilee candidates? Though it will probably change little now, it is still important for Kenyans to know the answer, because of the corrosive effect such allegations have on the legitimacy of the incumbent government.

If there is a logical explanation for withholding the data, it needs to be given. If there is not, the truth needs to be told and the file shared.

National dialogue is lost, Uhuru announces an underwhelming politicised cabinet, Odinga insists on being sworn in as parallel president, none of his co-principals turn up, the (mostly imaginary) NRM is banned,  the media are muzzled and minor politicians are arrested and charged with treason. Not Kenya’s best two weeks.

Meanwhile, the August 2017 election war carries on, not just in the debate over NASA’s bogus election results, but also in the petition courts. This post will look at where that battle stands and what we have learnt so far about the conduct of the August election.

Firstly, and most importantly, the procedural anomalies and issues which led the Supreme Court to annul the presidential election have not cascaded down to the Governors, Senators and MPs. Not a single member of the National Assembly or Governor has had their election annulled primarily as a result of issues with forms being unsigned, different paper being used, unstamped copies, different results being used electronically to the paper system or concerns about the display portal’s integrity. In fact, although they make references to it, judges appear to be disregarding the SC’s position as they make their judgements, with positions such as "The minor failures on Form 37A and 37B had no substantive effect on the outcome of the August 8 governorship election,” [Lady Justice Mary Kasango]

Judges are taking the view that specific allegations need to be made about malpractice in specific electoral areas to justify a review, and that adequate evidence of irregularities would lead to a recount of the affected areas, after which the matter would be settled, not to the election being annulled and a new poll (as the Supreme Court decided). And their focus has been almost entirely on the paper forms.

The only elected MP, Senator, Women’s Representative or Governor to have his or her election annulled so far has been the Wajir Jubilee Governor (Petition No.14 in Nairobi). As well as faking his degree papers, there were numerous IEBC issues including no records of assisted voting, ballot boxes reopened after sealing (to get the official results out) and extra lines written into the form 37C without obvious origins, as well as the wrong forms used and no available originals and Presiding Officers failure to sign forms.

That’s’ quite a vote of confidence in the IEBC’s operations. So far.

So what are the statistics saying? Beginning with the governors, there were originally 35 petitions raised by losing politician or voters against the results of the august elections:

Of those, five have been successfully withdrawn, four were dismissed on technicalities such as failure to pay the appropriate fees in time, and eight have been heard but dismissed. This includes the significant but expected victory of Alfred Mutua in Machakos today and the recent dismissal of the petition against Taita-Taveta Governor Samboja on the unusual grounds that he was already accused in criminal court of faking his university degree. One petition (Wajir) has been successful, and 17 are still running. In two cases (Marsabit and Mombasa), the courts refused to accept the petitioner’s withdrawal and have insisted the case continued nonetheless.

Of these 17, 6 are against the 26 remaining Jubilee governors and their allies and 11 against the 20 pro-NASA governors. NASA therefore still has more to lose from here on (though I doubt many of the petitions in their homelands will succeed, as the various recounts and scrutiny exercises across the nation have turned up virtually no malpractice and only minor tallying errors). Overall, I would not expect more than 2 or 3 more governors to fall to petitions (plus Samboja , if convicted).

Another week in the looking-glass world of Kenyan politics has left credibility damaged in every quarter. Amongst the confusion and lawbreaking by all parties of the last few days, I wanted to close out and revisit the aftermath of my NASA election postings of last week. Then maybe I can move on to current events.

The articles (mostly postings 4 and 5) went to a reasonably wide audience on 30 January - 2 February after they were picked up by some Twitter influencers, Africa Confidential,  then by The Star and Kenyan news sites. 8,000 people visited this blog in four days.

With the interest and publicity, I expected a rebuttal from NASA somewhere, in some form, but so far I’ve seen nothing. All I’ve seen is the usual trolling abuse in the comments section of the newspapers, with ad hominem arguments such as:

[The US connection is that The Star wrongly described me as an American professor in their first edition].

There was modest feedback on my blog site itself, constructive and positive, for which I thank you. One respondent raised Mandera, pointing out that it was even worse than some of the ones I had done (I had focussed on smaller and marginal counties). So I did Mandera as well.

As you might by now guess, NASA’s Mandera numbers are also a shambles. Their summary makes no sense: It gives a 29% turnout, and bears no relationship to the detailed polling station number they attached. It’s as if - when cobbling this mess together - they put the numbers against the wrong county. Their own polling station file gives Uhuru 20,000 more votes and Raila 40,000 more than the summary, so it doesn’t’ even make sense as a fake to help Raila; it’s just wrong:

This gives us the following in comparison to IEBC’s results, which need themselves to be treated with care, as Mandera has been a safe Jubilee zone and possible “rotten borough” since the 2013 poll:

                                                REGD                   UHURU               RAILA              TURNOUT
IEBC Presidential                   175,642                112,456                 17,984                 77%
NASA summary                     175,642                  10,937                 36,012                 29%
NASA Detail                           175,642                  30,562                 77,752                 64%

Comparing NASA’s alleged polling station presidential numbers with the IEBC’s parliamentary and gubernatorial elections, we see the following (all numbers rounded):

                                              REGD                   Jubilee+              NASA+                  TURNOUT
IEBC Governor                     176,000                  135,000                0                              78%
IEBC MPs                             176,000                  135,000                0                              78%
IEBC Presidential                 176,000                  112,000                18,000                     77%
NASA Pres. Detail                176,000                    31,000                78,000                     64%

“NASA+” and “Jubilee+” mean all candidates for those parties or alliances plus their openly avowed allies such as the EFP and KANU for Jubilee.

In fact, NASA had no candidate for the governorship or for the six constituency parliamentary seats or women’s representative at all (though they did have a senatorial aspirant). NASA was completely irrelevant in Mandera, as the contest was entirely between two pro-Jubilee factions. Given that, Odinga did well to get 18,000 votes there. The idea that 25,000 people voted for Jubilee candidates and then left without voting for anyone for President, and another 78,000 voted a Jubilee ticket and then Odinga is risible.

Again, NASA’s polling station file also shows obvious evidence of fakery, with turnouts close or over 100% in several stations, such:
9 MANDERA 37279 591652625 43 MANDERA EAST 213 NEBOI 28 MANDERA OPEN AIR MARKET 1041 9043021302801 MANDERA OPEN AIR MARKET 520 12 0 0 2 0 0 144 374
9 MANDERA 37297 825766069 43 MANDERA EAST 214 KHALALIO 44 BUR ABOR PRIMARY SCHOOL 270 9043021404401 BUR ABOR PRIMARY SCHOOL 270 2 0 0 0 0 0 71 196
9 MANDERA 37290 662810019 43 MANDERA EAST 214 KHALALIO 37 KARO PRIMARY SCHOOL 214 9043021403701 KARO PRIMARY SCHOOL 214 15 0 0 0 0 0 56 154
9 MANDERA 36972 202990442 39 MANDERA WEST 193 LAGSURE 16 NULL NULL 9039019301604 DARWED PRIMARY SCHOOL 627 10 0 0 0 0 10 42 578
9 MANDERA 37202 375024986 42 MANDERA SOUTH 209 ELWAK NORTH 37 ELGALA PRIMARY SCHOOL 1061 9042020903701 ELGALA PRIMARY SCHOOL 530 13 0 0 2 0 0 127 393
9 MANDERA 37167 467036697 42 MANDERA SOUTH 207 KUTULO 11 GOGOGESA SHALLOW WELLS 176 9042020701101 GOGOGESA SHALLOW WELLS 176 2 0 0 1 0 0 61 111

So, Mr Geoffrey Osotsi, the ANC and NASA IT expert who launched these figures, I am waiting to hear from you.

As a short addendum to yesterday's post, I was constructively challenged whether the NASA file I had been working on was the genuine one or some kind of fake or work in progress version. I had already cross-checked the summary against Osotsi's presentation but to be sure, I've now gone back to the NASA Facebook page here:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/CoalitionNASAKe/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1932129557115393

and extracted screenshots of the summary and of one of the pages for Narok that I was challenging yesterday, from the 408 pages they posted. They are identical. I post them here for you to reconfirm.

This is the summary from the PDF I was given and used:

Screenshot from NASA site today

The NASA image files are not easy to read, but it is visibly the same file.

This is one of the pages from the PDF for Narok I castigated yesterday:

And this is the same page extracted from the NASA website today:

Its very blurry, but recognisably the same page.

I've also been asked whether I am willing to share the underlying 17Mb PDF file. It is large, and since I got it from a friend, who got it from a friend, I wanted to be sure I wouldn't be causing anyone embarrassment before doing so. But in fact, The Elephant has already posted what is (on a sample basis) the same file.https://www.theelephant.info/documents/nasa-coalition-8th-august-election-results-presentation/

We come to the fifth and last of my deep-dive reviews of NASA’s alleged election results, which were  released to the media with great fanfare and confidence last Friday 26 January, and which NASA have been using to justify their claim that they won and that Odinga should therefore be declared Kenya’s President.

This will be the last such deep-dive, because while there is much more work which could be done, I am 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.

The clincher came with the fifth deep dive, on Narok. In parts one to four (Lamu, Tana River, Isiolo and Turkana) we have already confirmed that NASA was adding tens of thousands of votes to its summary totals which were not present in their detail file. We also confirmed that NASAs turnouts were unlikely and its presidential results odd compared to the results in all the other electoral contests taking place in parallel, meaning that tens of thousands of voters would have had to vote for Raila but then leave the polling stations, and even more would have had to vote Raila and then a Jubilee ticket. We had proved the summary page had been falsified, but we could not prove the detail file was also falsified.

In the case of Narok, the NASA summary matches the detail file, but the detailed polling station file is certainly faked (and therefore so is the summary). Beginning with the overall results which NASA claim are authentic, a county-wide turnout of 96.8% is ridiculous (see Narok, in yellow, 2/3 of the way down their file).

In NASA's detailed file, claimed turnouts were extraordinary everywhere, and exceeded 99% in 94 polling stations. In two polling stations they reported an achievement Stalin would admire, a 101% turnout with 620/616 votes voting in one station in Narok South and 442/438 in a station in Narok East. These are the relevant lines.
33 NAROK 40485 79752136 181 NAROK SOUTH 903 MELELO 53 NULL NULL 33181090305302 ENOOSOKON PR SCH 616 0 0 0 4 0 0 107 509
33 NAROK 40327 524611579 180 NAROK EAST 897 MOSIRO 3 OLOOLTUROT PRIMARY SCHOOL 438 33180089700301 OLOOLTUROT PRIMARY SCHOOL 438 0 0 0 4 0 0 210 228
 
These turnouts are impossible. The IEBC turnout for the same election was a (still high) 83%. 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.

                                REGD                     UHURU                RAILA                  TURNOUT
NASA Detail             342,719                 147,249                 181,535                96%
NASA Summary       341,730                 147,260                 181,562                97%
IEBC Result             341,730                  149,176                 129,390                83%

Comparing the August 2017 Presidential with the simultaneous Gubernatorial and Parliamentary election results, the implausibility of this is clear (all numbers rounded for clarity). Again, it seems someone has manipulated the polling station totals to add 50,000 votes to Raila (and only Raila’s) total.

                                         JUBILEE Cands   NASA Cands          TOTAL          TURNOUT
IEBC Gubernatorial          146,000                135,000                  287,000        84%
IEBC Parliamentary          175,000                  84,000                 287,000         84%
IEBC Presidential             149,000                 129,000                 282,000         83%
NASA Presid. Detail         147,000                 182,000                 331,000         96%

As in Isiolo, drilling down to specific polling stations to try to understand what might have happened, the NASA results and the IEBC results appear to be unrelated in any visible way. They are completely different files apart from the identical number of registered voters and the low scores for the minor candidates. See for example this section of a Form 34B from Narok East (picked at random)

And the equivalent section from NASA’s file:

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. 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:

On page 253 in Emurua Dikirr, they "pulled down" (if it was done in Excel) exactly the same 0-0-0-2-0-0 combination for the six minor candidates for more than 35 polling stations in a row:

And on page 254, Narok North, it continues with zeroes “pulled down” for more that 45 stations in a row:

 In summary, I believe 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 that 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.

The only scenario I 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. In Turkana and Narok, this seems to have been done using  a tool such as a random number generator fed by the number of registered voters and a desired ratio to generate the Raila and Uhuru numbers (while not paying much attention to the smaller candidates). Then, when someone realised late in the day that the resulting summary still didn’t meet their needs (probably because it didn’t show Raila had won 50% plus 1) they directly edited the summary file in a second level of fakery (which we have demonstrated to have occurred so far in Tana River, Lamu and Turkana) to make the total what they needed.

I am satisfied now that the NASA polling station document is a fake in whole or in part, and that the summary page used to try to convince Kenyans of their victory is a fake of a fake, with implausibly high turnouts, inexplicable results and bizarre integrities with the other seats contested at the same time, and which has also been modified to increase Raila’s votes in several counties to give him more than 50%. For, for me, sadly, the question I began with has been answered. 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.

As always, I would be delighted to have this opinion - which I suspect will raise some controversy - factually challenged, 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.