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A three-judge bench led by Isaac Lenaola ruled that the High Court does not have jurisdiction to hear presidential election matters/CFM

Kenya

Court rejects case to block vote tally

A three-judge bench led by Isaac Lenaola ruled that the High Court does not have jurisdiction to hear presidential election matters/CFM

A three-judge bench led by Isaac Lenaola ruled that the High Court does not have jurisdiction to hear presidential election matters/CFM

NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 8 – The High Court has dismissed a case filed by the civil society that was seeking orders to stop the presidential vote tallying process.

A three-judge bench led by Isaac Lenaola ruled that the High Court does not have jurisdiction to hear presidential election matters.

The bench ruled: “The Supreme Court has original and exclusive jurisdiction to hear and determine all matters arising from the presidential election starting from the nomination to the declaration of results.”

The bench however acknowledged that the matters raised in the application were urgent and needed attention, but from the right forum.

Consequently, the African Centre for Open Governance which filed the suit has been directed to seek redress in the Supreme Court.

Justices David Majanja and Weldon Korir were also on the bench.

The lobby group had wanted the High Court to order the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) to stop the tallying and verification of the presidential ballots and start it afresh.

The organisation represented by lawyer Haron Ndubi had claimed that the tallying was not credible.

“We want IEBC to be directed to revive the electronic voter tallying mechanism because it is the only accountable mechanism that defends the integrity of the ballot.”

“But before that is done we are asking that the manual tallying be stopped forthwith,” he told reporters at the court.

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IEBC Chief Executive Officer James Oswago insisted that the tallying process continues following the court dismissal and was expected to end on Friday night.

On Thursday, The running mate of Prime Minister Raila Odinga Kalonzo Musyoka disputed the results of far released saying they had been “doctored”.

Musyoka said that the failure of the Electronic Vote Transmission System facilitated the “doctoring” of results which are by law meant to be transmitted from the polling stations.

“There has been a total failure of the Electronic Vote Transmission system and we have evidence that the results we have received have been doctored,” the outgoing VP said at a briefing.

Musyoka, speaking on behalf of the Coalition for Reform and Democracy (CORD), demanded that the tallying process be stopped and re-started using primary documents from polling stations.

IEBC chairman Issack Hassan however dismissed the claims and maintained that the commission had not received any written complaints from the coalition.

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