Mobile technology could play a vital role in helping Kenya’s electoral body tally results in the country’s general election early next month.

This is according to Kenya’s Independent Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC), which says it plans to partner with mobile operator Safaricom to help transmit results from just over 33,000 polling stations to the country’s three national tallying centres from March 4.

Safaricom - which is Kenya’s largest mobile services provider with over 17 million subscribers - has already erected mobile signal boosters at the tallying centres in a bid to better facilitate both voice and data transmission.

Results from each polling station are then planned be transmitted to the three tallying centres by using an Electronic Results Transmission (ERT) system that the IEBC has acquired.

The ERT system enables presiding officers to use mobile apps to submit provisional results data over mobile data networks to the IEBC headquarters for consolidation and publication.

In areas where phone reception is weak, the IEBC plans to resort to satellite phones.

“The process involves the configuration of mobile phones and computers, which are the main equipment used for transmission, with the software and interconnecting them with the service provider's Virtual network for all the 290 constituencies and 47 counties,” says the head of the ICT department at the IEBC, Dismas Ong'odi.

However, concerns exist that the IEBC is not prepared to handle high volumes of traffic on the ERT system, following a trial run over the weekend that revealed potential faults.

The IEBC had convened a meeting of representatives of political parties in Nairobi, in a bid to test the efficacy of the electronic equipment that would be used in counting votes and relaying the results to central locations.

In the mock election, participants were divided into groups consisting of 'polling stations'. Other participants were to observe results trickle in on screen.

But when 'voting' at the 'polling stations' kicked off, results could not be transmitted to the 'tallying centre' as the equipment failed and the servers did not work. It was only after an hour that one of the 'polling stations' managed to transmit results to the 'tallying centre'.

“It is sending a very scary signal that the electoral body's over reliance on technology may work against them. We just hope that they have a backup, because this could really spell doom to the entire country. The whole nation is relying on IEBC for credible elections,” noted Fatma Waswa, an election observer.