By Winnie Kamau
Kenya held its first historic Re-Election following an annulment by the Supreme Court which cited irregularities conducted by the Electoral body, Independent and Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC) during the August 8th Polls. This is the first annulment decision ever made in the Continents history.
The polls on 26th October were opened by 6 am in most parts of the country logging 35, 564 Polling stations opened their doors, while 6,087 Polling stations are said to never have sent a message indicating whether they never voted or they were out of network coverage.
According to the Chairman of Kenya’s Electoral body, Wafula Chebukati in a press briefing said they had received 37,496 Forms 34 As from the 40,883 polling stations which have been posted online by 1 am today translating to over 85% of the polling stations opened.
In the statement to the media, Chebukati indicated that over 6.55 million Kenyans turned out to vote out of the 19.6 million registered voters which translated to 33.41% unlike the figure of 48% that he had given earlier and had also tweeted about it.
“We have not gotten all the results from the counties due to challenges because of weather and others security issues,” Chebukati said.
The Commission extended the polls to Saturday giving a second chance to the Polling stations that were not able to vote due to natural factors or issues that breach peace according to Section 55b of the Elections Act stating The procedure for the conduct of an election shall apply with necessary modifications to the conduct of the referendum.
But Chebukati warned if the Saturday polls would be distracted the Commission would not hesitate to make a decision “Now, if in case of Saturday we have similar issues the commission will have to make a decision on the way forward but we cannot keep extending the right to vote a decision will have to be made”.
From the current data received by IEBC indicates that 66.6% of Kenyans never turned up to vote based on the data from 267 constituencies that had reported their results by the close of the polls on 26th October at 5 pm.
