Posted
Wednesday, March 27
2013
Prime Minister Raila Odinga on Wednesday made a
strong push for the nullification of the results declaring Uhuru
Kenyatta as Kenya’s fourth president, stating that the voters registered
was inflated by about 36,000.
Through his lawyer, Mr George Oraro, the PM
further said the electoral process was marred by fraud, opaqueness and
other irregularities committed by the Independent Electoral and
Boundaries (IEBC) officials.
While making his submissions before the Supreme
Court, Mr Oraro said there was confusion as to the actual number of
voters while alluding to the fact that there existed two voters’
registers, a move he described as illegal.
Mr Oraro said the electoral commission had, behind
the backs of Kenyans, created a ‘special register’, long after the
‘principal register’ had been closed. The special register, the court
heard, contained between 31,318 and 36,230 new voters.
“As at February 18, we were informed that the
total number of voters was 14,337,339 voters registers when the
registration process by the IEBC had been completed,” Mr Oraro said.
“The IEBC later on stated that the number had been
amended to 14,352,533 in their affidavit, with an explanation that the
additional number arose from the fact that there were 12 voters who had
been included to vote in Soi constituency and a further 31,318 people
whose biometric information were not captured during the registration
process,” Mr Oraro said.
“This number, however, changed to 36,230 in
another affidavit. Based on these figures, Kenyans are confused on the
number of registered voters in the country. No one really knows how many
registered voters are there.”
Mr Oraro said that the matter became even more
interesting as another affidavit sworn by one Immaculate Kisait, listed
the registered voters captured by the BVR kits as 14,352,542, with
another 31,318 that had not been captured by the kits.
He said IEBC committed a massive electoral offence
to continue amending the principal register with only a few days
remaining to the March 4 General Election.
“The law,” he added, “does not permit the register
to be amended at least 14 days to an election, let alone creating a
special register,” said Mr Oraro. “What they have done is illegal,
irregular and unconstitutional.”
He posed: “Where was this special register used?
We want to know which counties. We suspect that in the areas where there
was voting in excess…these areas are in Rift Valley, Meru and Kiambu.
“That is why when the Supreme Court ordered the
re-tallying of the presidential votes, the electoral commission rushed
with the green books to legitimise the numbers contained in the special
registers. This is what we call in law as shifting of the burden of
proof.”
Mr Oraro further said that by its own admission,
IEBC allowed voters who had not even been registered at certain polling
stations to vote, saying this was a classic form of transfer of voters,
an electoral malpractice.
“An election can surely not be conducted in a
casual and cavalier manner,” he said and faulted IEBC for failing to
implement a number of recommendations by the Kriegler Commission, which
had been set up to investigate the 2007 elections, whose outcome ODM
contested.
The commission, he said, had proposed that the
number of election declaration forms be reduced to one, that the
tallying and vote transmission system be done in a secure manner and
that parties be given adequate time to interrogate the results before
their announcement.
“Sadly, all these were ignored,” he said. “At
Bomas, our agents were in fact thrown out of the National Tallying
Centre. These elections were characterised by massive irregularities.”
No comments:
Post a Comment