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2017 KENYA ELECTIONS

NASA asks Supreme judges to nullify presidential poll, order fresh round

Lawyer Jackson Awele takes Supreme Court registrar Esther Nyaiyaki through their filings/MOSES MUOKI

NAIROBI, Kenya, Aug 19 – The National Super Alliance (NASA) presidential candidate Raila Odinga and his running mate Kalonzo Musyoka now want the August 8 polls annulled and fresh elections conducted.

Odinga and Kalonzo who are the first and second petitioners respectively, hold in an over 25,000-page petition filed at the Supreme Court registry on Friday night, that the General Election was “fatally compromised” calling instead for “legitimate elections” to be held in its place.

“IEBC set out to frustrate the people’s will and deliver a flawed election. The inescapable conclusion is that individual returns, even those appearing to be valid votes, had fundamental irregularities in law,” a statement from the two read.

NASA argues that the errors in results declaration forms are simply irreconcilable, ruling out the possibility of amendments to correct the figures they claimed were doctored in favor of President Uhuru Kenyatta who secured a second term after garnering 8,203,290 votes (54.27pc) against Odinga’s 6,762,224 votes.

“The entire process of tallying, recording, transmitting, verifying and confirmation of results was so fundamentally flawed that you cannot talk of any meaningful results,” they asserted.

In the petition in which the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) is named as the first respondents, its Chairperson Wafula Chebukati as the second, and Jubilee Party’s Uhuru Kenyatta as the third respondent, NASA argues that a total of 14,000 results declaration forms out of 25,000 it examined were faulty.

“Some forms show one presiding officer’s name in charge of elections in multiple stations at the same time. There are 443 instances of un-gazetted polling stations, Forms 34A that are filled out in the same handwriting, blank forms, and others that have a polling station, names and details of agents as well as their signatures but are in spaces meant to show results,” a petition brief sanctioned by Odinga and Kalonzo reads.

Also in NASA’s petition is the argument that the votes cast in the presidential poll exceeded those in other elective seats and particularly gubernatorial elections in most of the 47 counties nationwide.

“Votes cast for president (15,588,038) exceeded those for governors (15,098,646) and Members of the National Assembly (15,008,818) by 482,202 and 567,517 ballots respectively.”

The petitioners also accuse IEBC Chairperson Chebukati of prematurely calling the election on Friday last week despite the fact that he, in their opinion, was yet to receive all the requisite results declaration forms from both polling stations and county tallying centers.

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“It has come to pass that by the time of making that declaration, the IEBC was yet to receive 11,883 polling stations results. The IEBC Chairman was yet to receive 17 constituency results, yet he did not qualify his announcement with the explanation that the difference was not sufficient to change the final outcome,” the two stated.

In their opinion, by the time Chebukati was declaring President Kenyatta as the legitimate winner of the elections on August 11, a total of 5,015 Forms 34A from polling stations with a cumulative number of 3.5 million votes had not been received at the National Tallying Center in Bomas of Kenya.

“The presidential election held on August 8, 2017 was so badly conducted and marred with such glaring irregularities that it does not matter who won, or who was declared the winner thereof,” NASA argues.

The alliance also pokes holes on the results transmission system deployed by the IEBC saying it excluded some 11,000 polling stations out of the total 40,883.

From these polling stations, NASA argues that results that could cater for 7 million votes were transmitted electronically through text without scanned images of results declaration forms to support them.

They also challenge the setup at the National Tallying Center in Bomas which according to the alliance, failed to meet standards set in the Constitution.

“It was not simple, accurate, verifiable, secure, accountable, transparent, open or prompt,” NASA lamented in its statement.

NASA is expected to serve respondents within two days, the respondents expected to reply within four days.

A pre-trial conference is expected to take place eight days after filing the petition, the hearing following immediately thereafter.

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The matter is expected to be determined within 14 days of filing, in this case by September 1.

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