Five days later, Kenya still doesn’t know the winner of the Presidential Election. This comes as a surprise for many political and democracy actors despite the election being described as largely ‘Free and Fair’ by all the Election Observers.
Kenyans went to the polls on Tuesday, 9th August, in what has been described as one of the regions most contested presidential races of recent time. The results seem to speak to this given that there is no clear winner yet even with over 90% of provisional results tabulated by media houses.
However only 271 of 291 form 34B have been reported to IEBC as at 9.49AM according to the Daily Nation, representing 93% of the total forms. But still with this, just about 50% of the official results have been released by the electoral body, IEBC.
As at 7.45AM, Sunday 14th August, the official results have William Ruto (UDA) in the lead with 3,609,736 and Raila Odinga (AZIMIO) with 3,387,109 from the 7,043,561 votes tallied. The IEBC placed voter turnout at 65.4% of the registered voters. This means just 49% of the official results have been released by the IEBC even after receiving over 90% of the 34B forms on which they derive the official results from the constituencies.
In the run up to the election, several pollsters indicated this was a tight race and the election results seem to agree with that research.
The IEBC has 7 days within which to announce the winner of the Presidential race and they have consistently said they will meet the deadline.
The winner of the Presidential elections needs 50% plus 1 of the valid votes cast and at least 25% votes in more than half the counties (24).
