Media coverage of alleged interference by Russia in the recent US elections has fuelled concern among Kenyan authorities over the vulnerabilities of tech systems ahead of the East African country's elections in 2017.

Kenya experienced system failure, particularly with the biometric voter system, during the 2013 general elections.

This lead to a fallback in the manual register which opposition parties claim was used to rig the elections.

In September 2016, members of parliament passed amendments to the Election Law, which requires the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) use electronic means to register voters, identify voters on the poll day and transmit results from polling stations.

However during a special sitting on 22 December 2016, the ruling Jubilee legislators included a return to manual system in the event of technology failure during the elections. They also shortened the time the IEBC should procure election technology from 8 months to 120 days, before the elections.

The proposal to have a manual backup system for the elections has been bitterly contested by the opposition.

The Cabinet Secretary for information, communication and technology, Joe Mucheru told the senate that the electronic systems could be susceptible to hacking even by terrorist group, Al Shabaab.

According to telecommunication and IT consultant Tom Makau the main motivation for using technology in any elections is to ensure transparency and accountability. "Not only should technology do this, it must also be able to show or demonstrate to all stakeholders that transparency and accountability is happening."

"The other motivation is of course to improve efficiency of the election processes, be it tallying or transmission of results," he added.

Makau believes that for adoption to happen all stakeholders must be convinced that the technology will work as expected. He added that the adopted technology should also have an inbuilt process of moving any automated processes to manual seamlessly should there be a failure during the voting process.

"It should also be tamper proof with the ability to indicate that tampering has happened," Makau said. This would be done by the help of IT auditors.

In the case of the 2013 general elections, Makau said that the systems should have been subjected to a stress testing period in the trial runs. The new election laws require that the commission test, verify and deploy the technology to be used at elections, sixty days before the poll date.

"Adopting proven and tested technology that has worked in other countries can lower the chances of failure," he advised. "Most important is the election officials using the technology must be familiar with the system UI and procedures."

The matter is still pending at the Senate house.