Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission poll tally out a year after election

Kenyans went to the polls on March 4, last year. [PHOTO: FILE/STANDARD]

By KIPCHUMBA SOME

Kenya: After a period of over one year, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has finally released the much-awaited final results of the March 4, 2013 General Election.

Over the last one year, legislators and officials from the official Opposition have criticised IEBC for failing to reconcile the poll figures – a factor they have claimed was admission on the electoral body’s part that the tallying exercise was seriously flawed.

All these suspicions may now have been put to rest, following IEBC’s decision to upload the 775-page document containing a detailed breakdown of the results in their website following a year of sustained pressure from the Opposition and a section of the civil society.

A statement from the commission said release of the results “comes out at a time when the commission is in the process of rolling out continuous voter registration as mandated in Article 88 of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010.”

It added that the report would help to increase the focus on the commission’s voter education efforts in the areas that had low voter registration and low voter turnout. The report indicated that some 12,221,053 out of 14,352,545 registered voters cast their ballots representing an impressive 86 per cent voter turnout.

It also indicated that there were 12, 776 candidates in total that sought some 1,882 elective posts that were up for grabs.

The commission had been under intense pressure from a section of the civil society to release the results of the polls in order to facilitate comparisons with results collated by other independent observers.

It is expected that the Opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy’s (CORD) will now go through the document with a fine toothcomb to ascertain the truth behind figures released by IEBC.

When petitioning the Supreme Court against President Uhuru Kenyatta’s victory, CORD had claimed that the true winner of the elections could not be ascertained due to the inconsistencies in the results announced by the electoral body.

During Supreme Court hearings the six-judge Bench led by Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court of Kenya, Dr Willy Mutunga, Phillip Kiptoo Tunoi, Jackton Boma Ojwang, Mohamed Khadhar Ibrahim, Smokin Wanjala and Njoki Ndung’u ruled in favour of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto and said that the rejected votes ought not to have been included in calculating the final tallies in favour of each presidential candidate.

The final judgement issued on April 16, 2013 was made in a record five minutes.

In the polls results released immediately after the March 4 elections, the IEBC ruled Uhuru had garnered 6,173,433 (50.51 per cent) of the votes ahead of Raila’s 5,340,546 (43.7 per cent).