The High Court has allowed accredited political parties and election observers to examine parts of the technology supporting the country’s continuous voter registration system, giving stakeholders limited access to IEBC source code and audit records as a legal dispute over the voters’ register moves forward.
Justice Gregory Mutai issued the interim order while hearing a petition filed by advocate Gilbert Njoroge, who is challenging aspects of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission’s voter registration technology and its compliance with legal requirements on the publication of the voters’ register.
The order allows authorised stakeholders to inspect specified technical records while the court considers whether political parties and observers have a legal entitlement to access the information.
However, the judge did not suspend the electoral technology or declare the system unsuitable for use in elections.
Justice Mutai limited the scope of the petition after determining that an earlier case challenging the general suitability of IEBC’s electoral technology had already been conclusively dealt with.
“The broader challenge to the suitability of the technology cannot be reopened,” the court held.
The remaining dispute will therefore focus on whether political parties and accredited observers should be permitted to examine the system’s source code and audit logs, alongside the question of whether IEBC has followed the law in publishing the voters’ register.
Njoroge based part of his petition on findings attributed to a KPMG audit of the voter register.
Documents presented in court indicated that the audit found 481,711 registrations with either duplicate or missing identification numbers.
The audit further reported that 164,269 entries had identification numbers that could not be matched with information held by the National Registration Bureau.
It also identified 246,465 deceased voters whose identification numbers were still contained in the register as of June 2022.
Justice Mutai said the findings raised “substantive questions” regarding the accuracy and transparency of the voters’ register.
The judge nevertheless cautioned that the court should not draw conclusions from selected sections of the audit report because the portions submitted did not include all material relating to database controls, system controls and responses from IEBC.
The court also took note of restrictions in the audit report concerning how its contents could be used and disclosed.
Njoroge alleged that the company providing IEBC’s technology had resisted efforts to obtain the source code and audit logs, citing intellectual-property concerns.
Justice Mutai said the allegations would have to be examined during the substantive hearing but found sufficient grounds for an arguable case to warrant limited interim access to the records.
The court declined to stop electoral operations, noting that the technology had already been deployed during the 2026 by-elections.
The judge further observed that Kenya’s electoral process combines biometric identification with physical result forms.
Other parts of the petition were removed from the case after the court found that the available legal channels had not been exhausted.
These included claims concerning the extension of the Smartmatic contract and the handling of voter data, which the judge struck out for failure to first pursue mechanisms before the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board and the Data Protection Commissioner.
The case will now proceed on the narrower issues of access to IEBC’s voter-registration technology and whether the commission has complied with legal requirements on publication of the voters’ register.