Hacking fears shroud Togolese election

Votes cast in this weekend’s presidential elections in the West African state of Togo will have to be counted manually because of fears the electronic vote-counting system has been hacked, the country’s top election official said Friday.

The head of the National Independent Electoral Commission (CENI), Tchambakou Ayassor, said it was a development that required an immediate response.

“While deploying these devices it came to our attention that there was a heightened risk of the systems being hacked – which we suspect had the aim of manipulating the results,” he told reporters.

“So we had to react to this so that the gravity of the matter would not be hidden.”

CENI had banned some observers from taking part in processing the results because of concerns over their impartiality, he added.

Togo’s current leader, President Faure Gnassingbe, is widely expected to win the election.