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.

With Odinga’s swearing in as ”President of Kenya” today and the banning of the NRM, attention is moving away from the legitimacy of Odinga’s claims to more urgent security concerns. But it is still essential for Kenyans and foreign supporters alike to know whether NASA’s claims that the election was stolen and that Odinga and Musyoka won have any merit.

So far, we have reviewed three counties, with two turning up gross fraud by NASA in their "results" summary and one left uncertain but with real doubts about the IEBC results as well. Today we look at Turkana.

While I have been trawling through the NASA file, I have also had the opportunity to watch the Livestream on ODM’s Facebook page of the event where NASA’s “stolen election” case was launched on Friday 26 January. This was introduced by James Orengo and led by Geoffrey Osotsi, an IT expert and now ANC nominated MP and attended by Odinga, Kalonzo and others. There was a huge degree of confidence in that room, with Orengo declaring “This is it” and Osotsi announcing “we are going to unmask the truth” and that they would report the "uncompromised and authentic" result.  The material presented was exactly the same  - at the summary level - as I have been analysing. Orengo confirmed that the data was taken from the IEBC servers but refused to say how. Osotsi's explanation for the difference between their results and IEBC's focussed again on the results display portal and its alleged hacking, without explaining how the "hacked" portal could have the same results as adding up the 290 paper form 34Bs produced by the constituency returning officers nationwide (which it did). Unless of course the returning officers were each faking the results in the same way in parallel.

IEBC's immediate response was dismissive, calling NASA's material "a deliberate attempt to create a non-existent reality" but Orengo's debating point remains sound: why did IEBC not release a similar file after the August election (recognising that they were not official results and by definition incomplete)  They were willing to do it for October (which I have) and the explanations for why they couldn't do it for August were far from compelling. The suspicion remains that they had something to hide.

Now, to Turkana. I begin by comparing the NASA summary page against the NASA polling station detail, then against the IEBC results and try to draw conclusions on the most likely story. We have already learnt that every single country summary produced by NASA's IT expert team so far examined was wrong, two of them hugely, the other marginally. I have also raised doubts concerning the Isiolo results reported by the IEBC, but have no further means to resolve them as we are in a “he said, she said” situation, with two competing “originals” with completely different results. But someone is lying and faking results, that I am sure.

Part four of the deep dive - Turkana - gave another mixed picture. NASA's polling station file, which I am sure was based on something taken from the IEBC, gave results closer to that in NASA’s summary than those reported by the IEBC. Registered voters were the same (roughly, allowing for my possible transcription errors) and there were no double-postings of EVID results

In Summary:
                                REGD                    UHURU              RAILA
IEBC                       191,435                  58,744                 71,063
NASA Summary     191,435                  37,444                 119,577
NASA Detail            191,325                 37,730                 112,914

There are two issues:
1) NASA has again added 7000 votes to their own total in the summary that aren’t in the detail file (so, again, the summary file has been faked).
2) There is a fundamental difference of 40,000 votes between the IEBC and NASA polling station-level reports.

So, which is right? The NASA summary would give a turnout of 83% in Turkana, a suspiciously high number and even the detail figure gives a high 79%, compared to IEBC's 69%.  Do the other elections give us any calibration? In the Gubernatorial election, it was a two-horse race. ODM (Nanok) won the governorship by 76,000 votes to 55,000 (all numbers rounded), which matches closely in turnout and voting pattern to the IEBC presidential results. 135,000 people voted in that election. In Parliament, of the six parliamentary seats, three were won by Jubilee, three by NASA. Jubilee candidates polled 62,000 votes while ODM polled 52,000, Wiper 10,000 and pro-NASA independents 6500, giving 62,000 for Jubilee and 69,000 for NASA. There were 136,000 votes cast, a 71% turnout. This gives us the following:

                              Jubilee                NASA+                  TOTAL
 Governor              55,000                  76,000                   135,000
 MPs                      62,000                  69,000                   136,000
 IEBC Presid.        59,000                   71,000                   132,000
 NASA Detail Pres 38,000                113,000                   152,000                 

From this alone, NASA’s polling station numbers look very questionable. 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.

Sampling a few specific polling stations at random to see if we can see a pattern in the discrepancies, we see in Turkana Central in the IEBC Form 34b:

To the NASA polling station file for the same four stations, there is simply no relationship at all:

In Turkana North, we see from the IEBC:

Against NASA's:

In both cases, there is little or no relationship between the two competing truths. I can only conclude that in both cases, one or other number has been “made up”. But which?

The story so far…NASA releases a set of data which they claim validates that they won the August 2017 Presidential election and on 26 Jan I am sent a 17 Mb PDF file which purports to be those results.

On first review, the detailed file looks superficially plausible, but the summary appears from two of two samples (Lamu and Tana River) to be a gross fake where someone has overtyped the real numbers (in the detailed attachment) with new numbers they made up, creating impossibly high turnouts which bear no relationship to their own source. In these counties, it seems NASA is trying to “rig” the polls in a crude and blatant way which can be disproved by anyone with a spreadsheet and a few hours, which if confirmed would surely be the end of whatever credibility NASA and Odinga had left.

I wondered initially if this file (which came without origin attribution) might be an incredibly clever ‘dirty tricks’ op by the Jubilee side, but then NASA released their results to the public, not as a PDF but as screenshots of that PDF, here.

 From a few checks, the documents look the same. So I think NASA's credibility and claims can be assessed, and stand or fall, on the truthfulness of the PDF, which appears to be truly their work.

With another day to look at the file, I am confidential that the polling station file began as a genuine hack of the IEBC (which is of course illegal, something I won't consider further). Whilst anyone can fake anything with enough time and attention, this would be a huge project with 40,883 polling stations, and doing so by duplicating stations, or doubling numbers, would soon become visible because registered voters would be wrong or turnout too high. Looking at the PDF line by line for a particular county (Isiolo), I cross referenced polling stations and registered voters and I am satisfied with the tools at my disposal today that this was at some point A data set from the August 2017 elections.

It is not of course, the 2017 Presidential election results. As explained in many places including my column for The Elephant during June-September, the official results are never from the IEBC servers but from the Form 34As and Bs, paper records which should match the electronic results up to a point but which take precedence if they do not. There are lots of reasons why the electronic and paper systems might not match (without imputing foul play), including keying and transcription errors when typing numbers in to the EVID system, and polling stations where the electronic systems failed entirely or in part, and simple arithmetical errors by tired clerks counting up polling stations manually on the paper system. Another technical reason why the electronic system and the paper would not match is double entry of electronic data. Though it should not have been possible, the file NASA released has a few cases where the same results were posted twice for the same polling station (slightly differently). I don’t think they were included in the IEBC totals, but if you don't manually find and exclude them one would become quite confused..

However, I struggle to imagine a situation where the electronic transmission system shows a result in a polling station which has a much larger number of votes for a candidate than the final paper return, let alone that we see this for most of the polling stations in a County.

Unfortunately, turning to Isiolo, that is exactly what we find. My third deep dive into NASA’s results returned a completely different outcome. Again, I have (because I downloaded them painstakingly from the IEBC servers while they were online) the original Form 34 Bs for Isiolo North and Isiolo South. I expected -  positing that the detailed polling stations file could be genuine - to see that NASA's electronic results would bear some relationship to the paper, but that was not the case.

This was NASA's summary for Isiolo: an 82% turnout (implausible) with a narrow victory for Raila by 3000 votes.

The IEBC official forms give an entry different result - a 5000 vote victory to Kenyatta over Raila with a lower 74% turnout. Again someone is cheating or faking their returns. Interestingly, one of the Official 34Bs is completely unsigned by agents, for a plausible reason, but certainly a warning sign.

On the other hand, there is an obvious flaw in the NASA polling station file too, which I missed on Friday. While the other candidates' names are written in a longer form, the name for the last two are shortened to "Uhuru" and "Raila" - see below

Someone has overtyped them before the PDF was created, which would also allow them to swap over the names, giving all Uhuru's votes to Raila and vice versa (though I don't think that happened, as Uhuru would then win Nyanza and Raila in Kiambu). But it means that this file too, even if it was once genuine, has been somehow played with.

In Isiolo's case, once you remove seven double entries for polling stations, which NASA had not spotted (which is why their turnouts were too high), NASA's summary and detail match approximately. So at least they didn't just make up the numbers completely as it seems they did in Tana River and Lamu:
                                     REGD      TOTAL    UHURU        RAILA
IEBC Form 34Bs           75,355      54370     26,746         18,931
NASA Summary Claim 73,358       61690     25,573         28,233
NASA Detail                  75,338       TBD        24,326         26,824

Whether a Raila victory is plausible in Isiolo though, I very much doubt, because of the parliamentary and Gubernatorial results. In the governorship, pro-Uhuru candidates won 95% of the vote and the ODM candidate polled 2%. In Parliament, in Isiolo North pro-Jubilee candidates won 2/3 of the vote, ODM didn't even field a candidate and the NASA (Wiper) candidate got only 2%. In the tiny Isiolo South, the NASA ANC candidate got 21%, NASA Wiper 5% and pro-Jubilee candidates 60%. A Raila victory would be completely contrary to the alignment of the main candidates and the voting patterns in all the other contests.

But the differences between the electronic return (which may of course have been "rigged" by NASA) and the paper returns are still inexplicable.  In Isiolo South, they are simply an entirely different data set.  Even Kenyatta's number have been reduced and recorded for Dida in the form 34B:

I remember finding the strong performance of Dida odd in Isiolo South in August, as he isn't even from the area and polled virtually no votes elsewhere in the country. So, more to follow.

This is my working file for verification if anyone wishes to review.

Tana River is another small marginal county, where again the plausibility of the claimed NASA August 2017 Presidential results can be tested reasonably easily.

As with Lamu, I follow a three stage process – comparing the official and the alleged NASA results in the summary, looking at the alleged summary results in comparison with the other elections held on the same day, and then comparing the summary against the detail in the large attached file. The results are sadly the same. The validity of the detailed file is unknown, but the summary is certainly a fake.

The official IEBC Presidential results were based on the form 34Bs for the three constituencies in Tana River: Garsen, Galole and Bura. These were as below:

Again, there were arithmetical errors in the IEBC Bura and Garsen results, with the totals for all valid votes not adding up, but the differences were immaterial (200 votes or so). In summary, in the official IEBC results, 87,631 valid or invalid votes were cast (a 74% turnout), with Kenyatta receiving 40,155 (46%) and Odinga 45,067 (51%).

In the NASA Summary, 105,888 votes were cast, an 89% turnout, which would be unusually high for this area. Of these, 29,405 were for Uhuru (28%), 11,000 less. They claimed 75,347 for Raila (71%) a huge 30,000 votes more.

These results are again implausible when compared with the Parliamentary results (official) for the three constituencies, which showed a 76% turnout, 89,878 votes cast and for the gubernatorial elections, which showed a 76% turnout and 89,528 votes cast. The NASA result would require 13% of voters, 16,000 of them, to have voted for President and not for Parliament or the Governor (unless NASA claim that all the election results including the ones they won were rigged of course).

Comparing the NASA summary to the polling station detail they attached, which claims to be the original and truthful polling station results, we see again that the summary result is grossly falsified. The polling station results for the 307 polling stations added up for the two main candidates (possibly containing a few transcription errors) were completely different: 57,757 for Kenyatta  and 24,851 for Odinga. I couldn’t believe this and rechecked it repeatedly, but the NASA detail results seem to show a huge Kenyatta win.

So, in summary:
Source                  Kenyatta                   Odinga
IEBC                       40,155                     45,067
NASA Detail            57,757                    24,851
NASA summary      29,405                     75,347

In conclusion, the NASA polling station data bears no relationship to the NASA summary (or the IEBC results), but it shows that Kenyatta decisively won the election there, while the NASA summary result has the situation reversed. Again, it seems, the summary is a clumsy fake.

As recently predicted, we saw the first annulment of a governor today, when Jubilee Wajir Governor Mohamed Abdi Mohamud had his August 2017 election annulled.

There were several reasons given, the most important of which being that he did not have a degree, and was therefore ineligible even to contest. He declined to testify in his own defence during the hearing. Other grounds mentioned in the verbal judgement were extremely bad administrative procedures due to poor presiding officer training (e.g. submission of photocopies instead of originals, altered forms), plus - it appears - 17 fake polling stations (not yet confirmed if this was genuine or just a paperwork issue) plus the IEBC admitted that its staff had reopened ballot boxes in 12 polling stations after closure and sealing without a court order (for legitimate reasons probably, but a procedural violation nonetheless).

I expect that Mohamud will also be ineligible to stand in a rerun, meaning Jubilee will need to find a new candidate. Jubilee will probably win the rerun, but it isn't a certainty and depends on clan arithmetic and who their nominee will be.