Mr Kalonzo Msuyoka, who is the Cord presidential candidate Raila Odinga’s running mate, said the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) should take the blame for the flawed vote count. “We as a coalition take the position that the national vote tallying process lacks integrity and has to be stopped and restarted using primary documents from the polling stations,” he said.
The remarks by Mr Musyoka would revive painful memories for Kenyans of the 2007 vote, when disputes over the count sparked ethnic violence that killed 1,200 people. But Musyoka told supporters to remain calm.
“This is not a call to mass action,” said Odinga’s running mate, adding that Cord was considering its options including moving to court to get an injunction to stop the process.
He claimed that in some cases, the total votes cast “exceeds the number of registered voters.”
Mr Musyoka said this was the case in Bureti, Kajiado south, Runyenjes, Wajir North and Kathiani constituencies.
However, IEBC figures painted a different picture. For instance, in Kajiado South, the registered voters are 46,388. The total number of votes cast is 42,276.
In Runyenjes, the total votes cast are 58,395 while the number of registered voters stands at 66,410.
Kenyatta’s team had no immediate comment but on Wednesday the Jubilee Coalition had accused foreign envoys of meddling in the Kenyan electoral process with a view to manipulating last Monday presidential elections.
The coalition’s running mate in the presidential election, Mr William Ruto, accused unnamed foreign ambassadors in Kenya of “canvassing” to deny his outfit what he termed as “a clear win.”
“We are very concerned at the level of involvement of ambassadors and foreigners canvassing for various positions in these elections. We know for sure that certain embassies have had positions in respect to this elections,” he ststed.
Yesterday Mr Musyoka also questioned the sharp fall in the number of spoiled ballots counted as Kenya switched from an electronic tallying system to manual.
The number of those ballots in the initial electronic tally, which has now been stopped, could have had a significant impact on the outcome of the polls. When presidential results transmission was done electronically about 340,256 ballots were rejected.
But after the IEBC stopped the electronic transmission and resorted to manual tallying on Wednesday the number of spoilt ballot decreased drastically.
By 2pm yesterday, spoilt votes that came from the equivalent of the votes counted during the electronic transmission the previous day were only 41,909. At that time, Mr Uhuru Kenyatta was leading with 2,660,379 votes, followed by Raila Odinga who had 1,996,181 votes that had been counted from 112 constituencies.
Mr Kalonzo Musyoka, Kenya’s outgoing vice president and running mate of
Cord alliance’s presidential candidate Raila Odinga, addresses a press
conference flanked by other alliance members yesterday in Nairobi. PHOTO
| AFP
About 11.5 million Kenyans took part in the elections in 290 constituencies.
As Cord demanded a stop to vote counting, various religious and secular institutions appealed for calm.
The Catholic Church appealed to Kenyans to give IEBC adequate time to tally and release the presidential results.
“We appeal to Kenyans to remain calm as the Commission finalises the vote counting,” the Church’s top organ, the Kenya Episcopal Conference, says in a statement.
The East Africa Law Society warned that Kenyans could lose faith in the electoral commission if politicians did not watch their comments at this critical time.
The Society’s president, Mr James Mwamu, said yesterday that tension has been building up in the country and any careless comment could lead to lack of confidence in the IEBC, which is yet to announce the final results of Monday’s General Election.
Mr Mwamu called on political contestants to desist from utterances that “are likely to incite people to do things that are not right.”
“We now have a new system in Kenya and we believe that anybody who has evidence of irregularities can keep them to be filed in court,” Mr Mwamu said.
He was speaking during a media briefing held in Nairobi where the society gave the preliminary report of its Election Observation Team.
While appreciating the complexity of the historic election, Mr Mwamu urged IEBC chairman Issack Hassan to speed up the vote tallying.
“Even as we call on Kenyans to exercise patience, it is also important for the IEBC to hasten the verification of the results. The people have waited for a long time but it would also not be fair to expect them to wait for a much longer period,” he said, adding that delays could only result in raising tension.
The observation team led by president of the Uganda Law Society, Mr James Sebugenyi, gave the IEBC positive scorecard on the overall, after witnessing their work at a number of polling stations in Nairobi, Coast, Nyanza and Western regions. Source The Citizen
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