You Will Access IEBC Servers, Nasa Told.

IEBC on Tuesday answered the opposition Nasa on its ‘irreducible minimums’, conceding to access to servers and a requirement to have all results forms to be sent concurrently with the text results.

The October 10 letter delivered to Nasa chief executiveNorman Magaya, however, might have come a tad too late following Mr Odinga’s Tuesday dramatic disengagement  from the October 26th repeat presidential elections, and demand for fresh electionsand a new pollswithin ninety days.

In his withdrawal, Mr Odinga blamed what he said was IEBC’s failure addressthe coalition’s concerns in the 12-point ‘irreducible minimum. ‘

In the letter, the IEBC also turned down a demand by the Raila Odinga-led Nasa to fire its Chief Executive Ezra Chiloba, commissioners Abdi Guliye and Boya Molu. The landmark Supreme Court ruling that annulled the August 8 poll did not find any IEBC staff or commissioner criminally culpable for the illegalities and irregularities the apex court cited.

Besides agreeing to allow candidates to gain access to its serversto see live results as they stream in, the IEBC also arranged to have agents of the candidates to acquire the results forms at the constituency and national tallying centre sit in as they are verified before results are announced.

“The results system has been modified to enable simultaneous transmission of both text results and the corresponding scanned results Forms 34A to the constituency and the national tallying centres,” IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati told Mr Magaya in the letter.

On the ballot papers, the IEBC has said it will standardise the results declaration forms with presiding and returning officers required to ascertain their security features before signing and submitting them.

The electoral team also agreed to share location coordinates of all the 40,883 polling stations as demanded by the Nasa team.

It, however, refused to provide the physical location of its local servers, citing security reasons, while at the same time sticking to its cloud servers despite Nasa’s demands for that not to be an option.

In the letter, Mr Chebukati also declined to hire a fresh team of 290 constituency returning officers, citing time constraints in training a new team.

“Due to limited time, the commission will not be able to recruit, train and deploy [new returning officers] but will use its permanent employees as ROs for accountability purposes,” Mr Chebukati