Retired president claim revives 2022 election dispute over vote tally and Ruto's win

Former President Uhuru Kenyatta addresses the Kiambu Delegates Forum, May 25, 2026. [Kanyiri Wahito, Standard]

Yesterday's explosive claim by retired President Uhuru Kenyatta that the late Raila Odinga won the 2022 General Election has opened a new front in the political battle with President William Ruto and revived questions that were at the heart of Raila's unsuccessful Supreme Court petition four years ago.

In a move that renews his political battle with his former deputy, Uhuru, for the first time, he publicly questioned Ruto's victory and said he believed Raila had won the election.

"Tulifanya kila kitu kumsaidia Baba awe Rais wa Jamhuri yetu ya Kenya. Na kura akapata, na mimi mpaka wa leo najua ya kwamba yeye ndiye alishinda hiyo kura. Tunajua vile mambo ilienda, na hatutaki iende hivyo tena," he said during a Jubilee Party National Executive Committee meeting in Nairobi.

Uhuru also questioned how Azimio la Umoja-One Kenya Coalition could have secured a significant number of parliamentary and county seats yet lose the presidency.

"How can you say you won yet we have most Members of Parliament, Senators, and Governors? How could you say we lost? We know how things went down," he said.

The claim puts the spotlight back on an election whose legal contest was settled by the Supreme Court on September 5, 2022, when a seven-judge bench unanimously dismissed Raila's petition and upheld Ruto's election. The IEBC had declared Ruto the winner with 7,176,141 votes, or 50.49 per cent, against Raila's 6,942,930 votes, or 48.85 per cent.

In the Supreme Court, Raila's petition alleged that the electoral process had been compromised at several stages, including the transmission and publication of presidential results. At the centre of the allegations were Forms 34A, the primary presidential results declaration forms completed at polling stations.

Raila's legal team alleged that some Forms 34A uploaded on the IEBC's public portal were different from copies allegedly issued to agents at polling stations. The petitioners cited 41 polling stations, focused mainly in Bomet and Kiambu counties, where they claimed the changes resulted in votes being deducted from Raila and added to Ruto.

According to court filings, the petitioners alleged that this manipulation cost them a total of 2,793 votes in the two counties alone, asserting there was "deliberate manipulation and tampering with Forms 34A.”

The petitioners also argued that the serial numbers on the forms remained the same while their contents differed, and that whoever had access to the IEBC portal could potentially alter the results remotely. This was one of the most direct vote-tampering allegations in the petition, leading to a court-ordered scrutiny of the disputed Forms 34A from the 41 polling stations.

However, the Registrar's scrutiny found that the original Forms 34A from the contested stations were the same as those on the public portal and the certified copies presented to the court. The judges also found that the alleged evidence of different forms supplied by agents was not credible in the circumstances presented to the court.

"No admissible evidence was presented to prove the allegation that Forms 34A were fraudulently altered by a group situated in Karen under the direction of persons named in the affidavit and video clip attached to it,” the Supreme Court noted in its judgment,

Elsewhere in their filings, Raila's team went further, arguing that IEBC Chairman Wafula Chebukati had run an elaborate and premeditated scheme to interfere with and undermine the integrity of the presidential election, a claim the court would go on to find unproven.

Raila's team further argued that the electronic system could be manipulated between the time a Form 34A was captured at a polling station and when it appeared on the IEBC public portal. Their technical argument centred on what they described as a possible "man-in-the-middle" attack.

The petitioners alleged that more than 11,000 Forms 34A were dumped onto the public portal within a short period on August 11, suggesting that the forms could have been temporarily detained or "staged" before being released.

The court recorded the petitioners' argument that staging would mean users with access to the system could intercept and withhold Forms 34A, manipulate them, before releasing them to the public portal. But after an ICT scrutiny exercise, the Supreme Court found no credible evidence that this had happened.

"No credible evidence was presented to prove that anyone had accessed IEBC’s Results Transmission System or that it was possible, from the design of the system, to intercept, detain and interfere with Forms 34A temporarily before uploading them back onto the Public Portal," the judgment stated.

The court further concluded that "the claims of access to the RTS to interfere with Forms 34A, and that 11,000 Forms 34A were affected by staging were not proved and remained just mere allegations."

The court also found that some of the logs relied upon by the petitioners either related to the 2017 presidential election or were forgeries. The IEBC's system, the court found, had safeguards including a virtual private network, polling-station-specific SIM cards, and KIEMS devices mapped to particular polling stations.

On August 15, hours before Chebukati announced the presidential results, four of the seven IEBC commissioners, vice-chairperson Juliana Cherera, Francis Wanderi, Justus Nyang'aya, and Irene Masit, publicly distanced themselves from the impending declaration.

"We have done the 2022 general elections most effectively and efficiently and ensured all the challenges have been contained, but some things need to be put out there," Cherera said. She added, "We are rejecting the results the Chairman is about to announce at the Bomas of Kenya due to the opaqueness of the process during the final phase."

The dramatic split created the impression of a Commission divided over the credibility of the presidential tally, with their central dispute concerning the conduct of verification and tallying and the role of the IEBC chairperson.

Raila's petition seized on their position, arguing that Chebukati had effectively excluded the other commissioners from the constitutional responsibility of verifying and tallying presidential results.

The Supreme Court agreed with an important part of that legal argument, holding that the power to verify and tally presidential results belongs to the IEBC as a Commission, rather than exclusively to its chairperson. The court found the chairperson could not arrogate to himself the power to verify and tally the results to the exclusion of the other commissioners.

However, Chief Justice Martha Koome emphasised that the four commissioners had not placed before the court evidence showing that the results had been altered.

"We note that aside from their 11th-hour walkout, the four commissioners have not placed before this court any document to show the result of the election was altered," Koome said.

The Supreme Court's judgment dealt with nine broad questions, including whether IEBC's technology met constitutional standards, whether Forms 34A had been interfered with, whether the forms uploaded to the public portal differed from those at Bomas and those issued to agents, whether the tallying process was constitutional, whether Ruto had crossed the 50 per cent-plus-one threshold, and whether irregularities were significant enough to affect the outcome.

The judges rejected the central allegations of technological interference and Forms 34A manipulation. The Court also rejected claims of systematic ballot stuffing and found that discrepancies between presidential votes and votes cast for other elective positions did not, by themselves, prove fraud.

Reiterating the legal threshold for nullification, the Court held that, "not every irregularity or procedural infraction is enough to invalidate an election. The irregularities must be of such a profound nature as to affect the actual result, or the integrity of an election, for a court of law to nullify the same."

While the court found that the constitutional structure required the commissioners to exercise oversight over verification and tallying, it held that "the Chairperson cannot arrogate the power to tally and verify the results... to the exclusion of other commissioners."

The Court concluded that the petitioners had not proved irregularities and illegalities of sufficient magnitude to affect the presidential results.