The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chairman, Wafula Chebukati, has called on the media houses to quicken their tallying of the presidential election results citing their numbers being behind the electorate’s updates.
Wafula Chebukati noted that the commission is almost done with the nationwide tallying while the media seems behind in numbers while they ought to be faster as final results are uploaded on the IEBC portal from the polling stations.
“It appears the media did not prepare very well, the actual figures should be at around 97 percent,” Chebukati said.
Chebukati argued that media houses allowed to take part in the tallying process should have tallied 97 percent of the votes cast since that was the percentage of Form 34As submitted at the time.
Whereby the Form 34As are first-hand documents used in tabulating results of the presidential election, it is filled by the Presiding Officer after the counting of votes at the polling station.
Form 34As contains details of the votes garnered by each candidate and then details the total number of registered voters in that station, the rejected votes, the objected ones, the disputed, and the valid ones.
According to Section 39 of the Elections Act, the IEBC “shall electronically transmit, in the prescribed form the tabulated results of an election for the President from a polling station to the constituency tallying centre and to the national tallying centre.”
Commending the citizens as the IEBC chairman said some 14.1 million voters voted on Tuesday, August 9; representing a 64.5 percent voter turnout out of the 22.1 million registered voters.
“From the kits that were transmitted, the voter turnout is 65.4%. This figure is will go higher once we compute the verification of turnout in areas that used manual voting. That figure will go up,” he said.
This is after the mainstream media houses and outlets keep on displaying different figures of the presidential election results, which has raised a concern according to the IEBC Boss saying it may cause anxiety in the people.
