Runaway electoral commissioners claim they were denied access to IEBC’s Backend in the last stage of the recently concluded electoral process, rejecting Presidential results announced by Chebukati.
Four IEBC commissioners have claimed that IEBC’s Chairman, Wafula Chebukati, had sole access to the portal’s backend where the final tally was conducted.
The four, led by Juliana Cherera (Vice Chairperson), Francis Wanderi, Justus Nyang’aya, and Irene Masit, made the claim during a press address at Serena hotel on Tuesday.
According to the Four, Chebukati only presented them with the final presidential election results supposedly from the backend controlled by Chebukati alone and refused to discuss them.
The Commissioners term this process illegal and questioned the credibility of the final results that were released to the public at the Bomas of Kenya on Monday evening.
“The tallying that was being done by our technical staff was not known to the commissioners until around 4:30 pm when Chebukati brought the results tabulated. He did not allow us to discuss the results…he just said ‘these are the results of each particular candidate’ and therefore he is going to read them. He did not allow us to discuss to see whether there were any disparities, following legal requirements,” said commissioner Wanderi.
“We announced results from several constituencies, all the members of the commission, and once that was done it was going to the backend. What we’re saying is that that backend was the privacy of Chebukati, not the rest of the commissioners. It would have required for him to bring that backend analysis to the plenary to discuss and look at the results, evaluate and see what has been done at the backend; that is simple.”
According to Juliana, as much as she agrees that the commission conducted the 2022 General Election well, she still rejected the presidential results pronounced by IEBC chair Chebukati, citing the ‘opaqueness’ with which she claimed the final stages of the tallying were done.
She mentioned Wanderi’s remarks stating that the Four IEBC commissioners were not involved in the final results, until the last minute when the results were presented to them before the announcement, at which point they decided to walk out.
“We have conducted the election and we did it to the best, we have improved in the processes as IEBC. We have upped the bar, we have considered the stages and processes that are supposed to be taken care of, but come to the last phase, the tallying phase, there was opaqueness. Things were not being shown to the public,” said Cherera.
“At Bomas, the screens were supposed to show cumulative numbers of the presidential candidates’ votes as they garnered and as we continued to read the results…the same was not displayed to the public, and the same was not given to commissioners.”
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“Just like the public was not aware, the commissioners were not aware of the cumulative results as the day went by. Two days to the end, it was not given out, so you could not clearly say that we have tallied 10 million, and this is how it is distributed.” She noted.
