The association of African ombudsmen observing the election has given the process a clean bill of health.
The association’s observer mission was led by the ombudsman from Malawi Grace Malera.
They said IEBC organised the election in a manner they described as professional, efficient and swiftly responsive to any hitch obtained.
Malera said in a statement that her team had toured 11 counties and visited polling stations on election day to monitor how the process was handled.
The mission says at the stations in the sampled counties, the processes were largely transparent, efficient and carried out in line with the relevant laws.
“The preparedness of the IEBC was noticeably sufficient in the manner that staff carried out the exercise, save for a few challenges,” they said.
The mission also hailed the commission for ensuring that a considerable number of women and young people were engaged as polling officials and that the youths were remarkable in handling the KIEMS kits.
It hailed the efforts by the commission to swiftly transmit the presidential results from polling stations through form 34A via the publicly accessible portal.
But the Malera-led team recommends that in future the commission should ensure that polling stations are spacious enough, to avoiding crowding of voters as this undermines the secrecy that should be accorded to them.
They also recommend that adequate signages should be mounted in the polling centres, to guide the voters and observers touring the stations. This will enable ease of navigation of the centres and avoid wastage of time.
The mission also recommends that the commission should make better arrangements in coordinating flow of information especially on the tallying of votes, to avoid misinformation that has been pervasive during the period.
“The counting and tallying process could be reviewed with the aim of expediting it, while maintaining accuracy to allow for more efficiency and promptitude in order to counter disinformation.
"The media could also coordinate their tallying of results to dispel disinformation and misinformation on social media,” they said.
(Edited by Bilha Makokha)
