• Vice chairperson Juliana Cherera and commissioners Francis Wanderi, Irene Masit and Justus Nyang'aya said they could not own the presidential results because of the opaque nature of the final phase of their verification.
• They said the summation of percentages of votes attained by each of the four presidential candidates defies logic.
Image: FILE
The Oxford dictionary defines opaque, an adjective, as "not clear enough to see through or allow light through" in reference to glass or liquid.
It defines the word as "difficult to understand or not clear" in reference to speech or writing.
The word is now all too familiar to most if not all Kenyans, thanks to four IEBC commissioners who denounced the results of the August 9 general election.
Vice chairperson Juliana Cherera and commissioners Francis Wanderi, Irene Masit and Justus Nyang'aya said they could not own the presidential results because of the opaque nature of the final phase of their verification.
The four commissioners also cited a lack of transparency in the transmission process.
The 12th Parliament allowed live streaming of the results in their regulations but IEBC partially implemented the requirement.
In the results, Deputy President William Ruto was declared winner with 7,176,141 votes, Raila Odinga came second with 6,942,930 votes, George Wajackoyah was third with 61,969 votes while David Waihiga finished fourth with 31,987 votes.
This translates to 50.49 per cent of the vote for Ruto, 48.85 per cent for Raila, o.23 per cent for Waihiga and 0.44 per cent for Wajackoyah.
"This summation gives us a total of 100.01 per cent. The 0.01 per cent translates to approximately 142,000 votes which will make a significant difference in the final results," Cherera said at a press conference shortly before the results were announced.
Kenyans were quick to dismiss her claims as pedestrian saying 0.01% of 14.2 million valid votes translates to 1,420 votes and not 142,000.
Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission chairman Wafula Chebukati on Wednesday also dismissed the commissioners' claims as false and misleading.
But are Chebukati's final presidential results really opaque? Let's find out.
Some 22,120,458 Kenyans were registered to participate in the August 9 general election.
However, at the end of the exercise, it emerged that the voter turnout was 65.4 per cent.
This translates to 14,466,779, the number of voters who turned up and voted.
However, out of this number, some 113,614 Kenyans cast their ballots but their votes did not count because they were invalid.
They were, hence, categorised as rejected votes.
A rejected vote is one which cannot be counted due to improper marking by the voter.
They include ballots which have more than one mark, the intent of the voter cannot be ascertained, the voter can be identified by their mark or the ballot paper does not bear the IEBC stamp on the back.
This, therefore, means, of the 14,466,779, people who turned up and vote, 113,614 votes were thrashed leaving us with 14,353,165 as valid votes.
However, in Chebukati's final tally, he indicates that there were 14,213,137 valid votes (140,028 less).
Similarly, if you add all the valid votes attained by the four presidential candidates (7,176,141 +6,942,930+ 61,969+31,987) you get 14,213,027.
This is 110 votes less than the 14,213,137 indicated by Chebukati as the total valid votes.
If we work with the actual voter turnout (14,466,779) minus the rejected votes (113,614) we also end up with slightly different percentages of votes attained by each of the four presidential candidates.
For example, Ruto was declared winner with 7,176,141 votes translating to 50.49 per cent of the vote, according to the IEBC.
But if we calculate his percentage using the figures attained from the valid votes (14,353,165), it would translate to 49.996924023 per cent.
Using the same figure, Raila (who got 48.85 per cent as per IEBC) would get 48.372118623 per cent.
The percentage would be 0.43 for Wajackoyah and 0.22 for Waihiga.
Also, based on Chebukati's final tally of percentages each candidate attained, without rounding off the figures, they don't add up to 100 per cent.
The figures show Ruto got 50.489494332 per cent, Raila had 48.848681329 per cent, Wajackoyah had 0.435998049 per cent while Waihiga had 0.225052358 per cent, translating to 99.999226068 per cent.