Skip to main content

A Kenyan election tallying officer stuffs voting material into ballot boxes before they are transported to different polling stations in the Kibra Constituency at a tallying center in Nairobi, Kenya August 6, 2017.BAZ RATNER/Reuters

In one of Africa's most technologically advanced economies, a hotly contested election on Tuesday could be decided on a new electronic battlefield, where candidates fight for dominance with the latest political technology.

Polls show that Kenya's election is a tight race between President Uhuru Kenyatta and his archrival, the veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga. The kidnapping and murder of a senior election official and the deportation of two foreign election advisers have added explosive new twists to the final days of the campaign.

With the race too close to call, the outcome could be determined by shadowy new techniques: social-media manipulation, voter data harvesting and potentially even the threat of illicit interference in electronic vote tallying.

The crucial role of the new technology was highlighted on Saturday, when Kenyan police deported a Canadian and an American who were providing data analysis for Mr. Odinga's campaign.

Andreas Katsouris of Toronto, a senior vice-president of Aristotle, Inc., was detained in Nairobi on Friday night and deported the next day. The company's chief executive, John Aristotle Phillips, was also detained and deported. Their Washington-based firm provides strategy and data analysis for political campaigns worldwide – similar to the analysis that Mr. Kenyatta receives from his own British-based consultants for a reported $6-million (U.S.).

Armed men on Friday raided an opposition data centre where Mr. Odinga's supporters were developing a database of polling stations for a parallel vote-tallying system. The men, including police officers, took dozens of computers and intimidated the campaign workers, the opposition said. Police denied it.

Even more important than the data-harvesting technology will be the system that runs the election itself – and the vote-tallying afterward. That technology is intended to prevent vote-rigging, but it could be vulnerable to outside influence.

Kenya, one of the biggest economies and most vital democracies in Africa, has opted for an electronic voting system in Tuesday's election – despite widespread malfunctions in the biometric system when it was attempted in the previous election in 2013.

Mr. Odinga has alleged that the last election was rigged by Mr. Kenyatta's party, the Jubilee Alliance, during the electronic transmission of voting results. Yet, a similar system will be used again this time, with computerized tallying and biometric scanning of voters, even though there are concerns about a lack of preparation time, especially after the failure of biometric methods in several recent African votes.

Suspicions of election fraud were dramatically heightened when an election technology official, Christopher Msando, was brutally tortured and murdered last week. His unsolved killing has focused attention on the key role of technology in this election. The opposition immediately alleged that he was eliminated to allow Mr. Kenyatta's forces to control the voting results.

Mr. Msando was the acting director of information and communications technology at Kenya's election commission. He was one of a handful of officials who knew the passwords, encryption codes and server locations for the election commission's computer system. He was killed just before he was scheduled to oversee a test of the live-transmission system for the election results.

"The killing of Christopher Msando is catastrophic for his family and for the country's preparations for election day," said a statement by Otsieno Namwaya, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "Msando's killing could have huge ramifications for Kenya's elections, given his pivotal role in the preparations."

In a country where elections are closely fought and many citizens vote on the basis of ethnic loyalty, any hint of vote rigging will heighten the danger of postelection violence. An estimated 1,500 people were killed and more than 600,000 left homeless during violence after the 2007 vote. That spectre still haunts Kenya's politics today, keeping alive the fears of fresh violence.

While the vote-tallying technology could be crucial to the final outcome, another form of technology has dominated the election campaign: social media, which is being used to mobilize and influence voters.

Kenya, a leading African hub for digital innovation, has a vast and vibrant community on social media. More than six million Kenyans are on Facebook, about 2.2 million are active on Twitter, and there are 15,000 registered bloggers. Social-media technology and data mining could play a key role in Tuesday's election.

Mr. Kenyatta's party has hired a British-based firm, Cambridge Analytica, to sharpen its election strategy. The firm, with heavy U.S. funding, helped get Donald Trump elected as U.S. President last year, using the tactics of mass data harvesting and analysis of voter data. On its website, it claims to have up to 5,000 data points on more than 230 million U.S. voters. It says it offers a blend of "predictive analytics, behavioural sciences and data-driven ad tech."

Its exact tactics in Kenya are unknown, but it is reportedly receiving $6-million for its Kenyan election work. Kenyan media have reported that its team is working from the seventh floor of the Nairobi headquarters of Mr. Kenyatta's political party.

Mr. Odinga had his own experts, from Washington-based Aristotle Inc., until they were deported on Saturday. The firm says it has a national voter file in the United States with more than 192 million records, each with more than 500 attributes – from voting histories to hobbies.

Social media, meanwhile, has become increasingly important in Kenyan political technology. Commentators have described this election as the country's "first social-media election." The campaign is increasingly fought on social media, often with fake reports that are tailored to look as if they were genuine media reports.

A recent survey of 2,000 Kenyans, released by British political consultancy Portland Communications and GeoPoll, a U.S.-based mobile survey platform, found that half were getting their election news through social media – and 90 per cent had encountered fake news reports.

The front page of one Kenyan newspaper was falsified on social media to show an opposition member defecting to the ruling party. Two fake video reports, purporting to be from BBC and CNN, were circulated on social media with false news that Mr. Kenyatta was far ahead in the polls. Other fake reports promoted hoaxes that the opposition was U.S.-funded and that Mr. Odinga was corrupt.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe