Recount shows we did a clean job electoral commission, tells judges

By Wahome Thuku
NAIROBI; KENYA: The electoral commission has declared the scrutiny of electoral forms and re-tallying of results ordered by the Judiciary, prove the elections were free and fair.
“The scrutiny largely confirms our case that there was no mischief or abuse of law in the election exercise,” Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission ( IEBC) lawyer Nani Mungai told the court yesterday.  Mr Mungai said the commission had explained all discrepancies spotted by the scrutiny team.

“We have filed explanation for each and every one of them. The affidavits of Returning Officers explain all the discrepancies and when you look at them you see they are not discrepancies at all,” he told the judges.
On reports that some Forms 34 were not given to the court, he said the IEBC had provided the documents voluntarily. He said all Forms 34 used in declaring the results in polling stations were given to all parties.
“If this was not the case the petitioners would have been the first to point it out in their petitions,” he added. Mungai said following the court order on Tuesday, more than 200 people were deployed to avail the forms to court.
On having more than two Forms 36 from one constituency Mungai said all forms were provided by the IEBC and did not come from elsewhere. “The way we understand the Constitution is the final tallying lies with the IEBC. Some forms had errors made by the Returning Officers. But to be transparent to the court we brought here both the final Form 36 and the one containing the errors,” he said.
Primary figures
The IEBC said wherever the petitioners had claimed there were more voters than those registered, they had produced the green book containing the primary figures to disprove the allegations.
“We provided thousands of green books to the tallying team,” he added. The commission said though the scrutiny had been ordered by the court, they would have conducted a similar exercise according to the election petition rules if any party had demanded for the same.
Mungai asked the court to consider that in every controversial case, there were people whose right to vote could not have been denied.
“If there is evidence the extra person had right to vote, they can’t be disfranchised on basis of desktop analysis,” he said. Lawyer Njoroge Regeru, representing a group of three petitioners, said the report had not affected the number of rejected votes announced by the IEBC.