High Court orders vote recount in Babu’s Embakasi East

Owino and his bodyguard are facing charges for assaulting a parking attendant in Westlands/FILE

NAIROBI, Kenya, Feb 12 – The High Court on Monday ordered for a recount of all the ballots cast in the Embakasi East constituency poll carried out as part of the General Election on August 8, 2017.

The order for the recount was granted in response to an application made by the petitioner Francis Mureithi who lost to the Orange Democratic Movement’s Babu Owino on a Jubilee ticket.

The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has Tuesday and Wednesday to make the sealed ballot boxes available to the court before the Deputy Registrar gives directions on how the exercise should be conducted on February 14.

Once the recount is concluded, the Deputy Registrar then has two days, as per the instructions of the court, to submit a report.

Mureithi in his application made the case that the illegibility and discrepancies on the result forms made it difficult to ascertain what the true results were.

When he was arrested last month for an altercation with a parking attendant, Owino claimed the petition was the motive behind it; claiming it was meant to lower his standing before the court.

READ: Sakaja secures Owino’s release querying timing of arrest

About The Author

OLIVE BURROWS

With a decade of storytelling under her belt, Olive Burrows has been with Capital FM for the last four years and perhaps most notably interviewed US President Barack Obama. Committed to asking the hard questions and telling the story in the most engaging way possible, she has also interviewed Melinda Gates, a UK Minister and severally had the opportunity to sit across from President Uhuru Kenyatta and address the pressing issues of the day. Other notables she has had occasion to seek answers from are UN Secretary General António Guterres and John Kerry in his time as US Secretary of State.

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