Lawyers representing respondents in the election petition challenging the outcome of the March 4 presidential elections
have said the scrutiny by the supreme court of 22 polling stations has confirmed that there was no malpractice involved in the voting and tallying of the election results.
The lawyers appeared in court today where they submitted their responses to two reports prepared by the Supreme Court after it scrutinized the 22 polling stations using form 34 and form 36 to determine the number of votes cast against the number of registered voters.
Nani Mungai, Counsel representing the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission said that the retally and scrutiny by the court confirms the position of the IEBC in the matter. In response to the discrepancies highlighted in five constituencies by the scrutiny, Mungai said that the IEBC had already filed evidence answering the errors in each of the five constituencies adding that the evidence provided by the IEBC indicates that these are not discrepancies.
In regard to the missing form 34s Mungai said that all the forms were provided by the IEBC to all the parties in the petition. He said that because the IEBC was given only three days to provide the forms there was likely to be some omissions, but all the forms were eventually provided by the commission.
In response to extra form 36s, Mungai said that some returning officers had made errors in the first tally of the results and new forms were provided by the IEBC for retallying when the errors were found. He said that the the IEBC provided both the forms 36s with errors and those with the corrections to show there was no mischief on part of the respondent.
Mungai denied the allegation made by Oraro, the counsel acting for Cord that the greenbooks were not provided to the courts stating that the ‘green books’ were exhibited in the affidavits of returning officers and that the court has every green book used in the poll. He added that the IEBC provided thousands of green books to be used in the scrutiny by the court.
Fred Ngatia advocate for the Jubilee Alliance
said the retallying by the court shows a trend that the tallying carried out by the IEBC was to a fairly high degree of accuracy. He said IEBC officials may have made one or two clerical errors but mischief
cannot be attributed to a few clerical errors.
Deputy President William Ruto’s lawyer, Katwa Kigen said the report by the Supreme Court do not support the issues raised by the petitioners. He said there are no form 34s missing as all the parties in the case have access to the forms.
He said that the scrutiny does not show whether there were two form 36s both signed by the returning officer. He said there was no duplication of form 36 adding that the returning officer verified form 36 before countersigning them.
Kigen added that the report does not show any malice or interior motive by the IEBC adding that it instead vindicates the respondents.
The Supreme Court will tomorrow deliver its ruling on the election petition filed by the Cord Coalition and Africog challenging the outcome of the election in which Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the President elect.