February 1st 2006

The Chairman
Electoral Commission
Kampala, Uganda.

OPEN LETTER TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE ELECTORAL COMMISSION

Accept our thanks and gratitude for the work you are doing to try and maintain a semblance of fairness in the extremely unlevelled political field ahead of the 2006 elections. We have again chosen to address you publicly so that this letter reaches multiple audiences: To alert you and to alert the public of potential threats to the fairness and transparency of the upcoming polls. As the election date approaches rumors have intensified and it will become increasingly difficult to sift the real concerns from the imagined ones, but we shall trouble you with the ones that bear some level of authenticity and credibility.

Owing to our mutual efforts to create a conducive environment for elections, fear of rigging has shifted focus from the polling station to vote tallying. It is our belief that through our joint efforts rigging at polling stations will be reduced to unsophisticated attempts of fraud and rights violations including outright harassment and open bribery of agents (both our and yours) which are easier to witness, monitor, and report. Of critical concern now is what will happen after ballot boxes leave polling stations for tallying centers at Sub-county, Constituency, and/or District levels before arriving at your headquarters. Our ability to monitor movement throughout the country is limited and it is here that we rely mostly on the integrity of your officials, which based on past experience is not very comforting. In that regard we have tried to establish our own tallying system at various levels in a wide sample area to test whether the results that you will receive from specified polling station, sub county, constituency and district terminals will match our exit polls. While this is not a full proof method it is better

than relying on the integrity of officials alone and will provide a rallying point for voters to challenge potential mischief.                     

This brings me to the point of immediate concern for which we are still trying to devise an antidote. As you recall, in the 2004 Ukraine election, hackers of one candidate tampered with the computer server of the Central Election Commission to produce a result in his favor. Considering the great work your team has done to computerize systems at the Commission it is not in the realm of imagination to expect a similar situation. One of the incumbent’s best known computer wizards based in the United States will arrive in Uganda one week prior to elections on an undisclosed mission. Accordingly, based on the Ukraine experience, we have decided to present to you our concerns for the possibility high tech robbery of the election so that you may protect your servers from theft.

The electorate would like to know if at this time and up to the time of elections the firewalls and passwords for servers are monitored and who is monitoring them. Voters want to know that the server room is locked and inaccessible to all potential hackers between now and elections and that party representatives have access to it and can witness that it is safe with all passwords and firewalls in place.

Our strategy beyond placing complete faith in execution of these precautions is to compare the results that the Commission will release with those from source documentation from polling stations and if the gap between the two is massive we shall do more than raise our eyebrows because we realize that in order to hack into your servers the hacker would need some level of access and authorization.

The Electoral Commission should permit a team of system administrators mutually agreed on by all participating parties to access the Commission’s tallying center servers to ensure that firewalls and other anti-hacking intrusion systems are up and running full time before and during the tallying exercise in order to quell rising fears and suspicions.

Thank you for your usual cooperation.

Anne Mugisha
Special Envoy, Office of the President, FDC