Signs that something weird was going on emerged well before the election. A month earlier, Kenya’s electoral commission contracted Ghurair, a Dubai publishing firm, to print ballots. Newspaper reports linked the company to Kenyatta’s inner circle, and Kenyan courts ordered the electoral commission to use a different firm. The order was ignored, and the electoral commission issued a single-source contract to Ghurair anyway, citing time pressure. Then the accounting firm KPMG reported that more than a million dead people might still be registered as voters. NASA officials complained that Ghurair could print extra ballots to be used to create pro-Kenyatta ghost votes. Kerry dismissed these concerns, quipping after the election, “The people who voted were alive. I didn’t see any dead people walking around.” [...]
People who have witnessed election fraud in other African countries have told me that it’s normally done by making small changes to large numbers of tallies and this appears to have happened in Kenya, where there were over 40,000 polling stations. After NASA submitted its petition, a team of American experts led by University of Michigan Professor of Statistics and Political Science Walter Mebane volunteered to conduct a forensic analysis of the results. Results that have been tampered with show patterns and Mebane’s computer program identified over half a million fraudulent votes in this manner—almost certainly an underestimate of the true number. [...]
Another rigged election in Africa is not news. But that US election observers were so quick to endorse it is shocking. Perhaps they believed that wrapping the election up quickly would prevent violence. After Kenya’s 2007 election, which most observers have since concluded was rigged against Odinga, some of his supporters went on a looting and killing spree in ruling-party strongholds. Gangs backed by ruling-party officials fought back and the ensuing mayhem left more than a thousand people dead, caused hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, and nearly shut down the economy of much of eastern Africa, which relies on transport from the Kenyan coast. Members of Odinga’s coalition were quoted making ethnically charged statements, but it was Kenyatta and his current deputy, William Ruto—who was then allied with Odinga, but has since switched sides—who were charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity for organizing and supporting the violent gangs. (The cases against them collapsed after witnesses were intimidated or died under mysterious circumstances.) [...]
A far more troubling possibility is that the US wants Kenyatta to remain in power, at the expense of democracy. Kenya lies in one of the most volatile regions of the world. Its neighbor Somalia has been a war zone for a decade; conflict in South Sudan has sent more than two million refugees scrambling to neighboring countries, including Kenya, since 2013. Two of Kenya’s other neighbors, Uganda and Ethiopia, are ruled by US-backed autocrats who have instigated or worsened these conflicts. Ethiopia’s US-assisted invasion of Somalia in 2006 set off the mayhem there, promoting the rise of the Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab. In 2014, Uganda entered the South Sudan civil war on the government’s side. Humanitarian organizations called for an arms embargo, which would have made Uganda’s involvement illegal. The UN Security Council, including Russia and China, seemed open to an embargo, but the Obama did not pursue it.
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