Jubilee maintains a million-plus gap on second day of vote counting

Supporters of Taveta member of Parliament, Naomi Shaban celebrate at Mahoo tallying centre in Taita Taveta County. The incumbent member of Parliament was leading in vote counting exercise yesterday 9th August 2017. Photo: Omondi Onyango/Standard

President Uhuru Kenyatta was last night leading by nearly 1.4 million votes against his political opponent, Raila Odinga.

By 8.40pm, provisional results from Tuesday's polls indicated that Uhuru was leading with 8,000,436 votes (54.3%) against Raila's 6,601,770 votes (44.81%), a difference of 1,398,666

The results were from 39,479 polling stations out of the total 40,883 stations.

Raila has since termed the provisional results fraudulent.

Uhuru maintained a 10 per cent gap between him and Raila throughout the day, pointing to a round one win in the race that was initially billed by pollsters as too close to call.

Provisional results

These figures, however, will have to be verified using Form 34A from all the polling stations before the commission can declare the results as final. The verification process started yesterday.

IEBC will have to ensure the winner has attained 50 per cent plus one of the votes cast and 25 per cent of votes in at least 24 counties.

Constituency Returning Officers are required to collate results from Form 34A to generate Form 34B, which will be then used by the commissioners at the national tallying centre to generate Form 34C for final presidential results.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Chairman Wafula Chebukati said the agency would have to first verify all Form 34As from all the 40,883 polling stations countrywide before declaring the winner.

The commission said official results are currently being collated and will form the basis for announcing the winner of the presidential race.

The commission had by yesterday 9am received a total of 28,000 form 34As. Forms 34A are generated at the polling stations while forms 34B are generated at the 290 constituencies.

The commission said this even as it emerged that it had earlier indicated that the system could only submit results containing both texts and the forms.

But going by the provisional results, almost half the polling stations that had submitted their results did so without attaching the required form.

Yesterday evening, the each of the commissioners took charge of the verification of forms 3B from seven to eight counties to speed up generation of forms 34C which will be used to declare the presidential winner.

Unexpectedly longer

It was not immediately clear how long the commission will take to declare the outcome of the polls. Mr Chebukati suggested it may take longer to verify all the documents.

At the same time, the commission said it had agreed with agents of presidential candidates to print out forms 34A for scrutiny.

But yesterday morning, Raila told his supporters to reject the outcome of the polls and accused Uhuru's Jubilee Party of hacking into IEBC database and manipulating election results at all levels.

IEBC has promised to investigate the claims.

Raila said according to National Super Alliance (NASA) tallying centre, he had polled a total of 8.1 million votes against Uhuru's 7.2 million.