The 2013 presidential election in Kenya will apparently go down in history as the poll in which paper trumped technology --- what with the failure of the biometric voter-identification kits delivering a polling day blow; and the electronic transmission system coming to a standstill after nearly 36 hours of the commencement of the counting process!

While it was the lack of electricity at the polling stations that led to the failure of the high-tech biometric kits, leaving the election officials with no choice but to go back to the paper register; the failure of the digital transmission system was somewhat mysterious. The system had been designed to communicate the poll results in real time, from polling stations across the country to a national tallying centre in Nairobi.

However, the failure of the new polling technology resulted in a situation where choppers had to be pressed into service to fly officials carrying the poll's results to the country's capital.

According to a Financial Times report, the head of Safaricom - Kenya's foremost mobile phone company, which had provided the network for the electronic transmission system - had warned the IEBC about the shortcomings in the digital transmission system weeks ahead of the elections.

Meanwhile, noting that the failure of the system was partly a result of a lack of transparency about the system in the run-up to the vote, Nairobi-based technology blogger Erik Hersman said: "How the system works and who it was tendered to, should have been known months ago."