As the deadline for evidence to be submitted to the Supreme Court for an election petition draws near, thousands of the form 34As that confirm the result at the polling station level are still missing from the electoral commission’s online portal.
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Full set of figures for the number of forms 34A online, by polling station. The figures demonstrate that as early morning on 17 August 2017 there were only 31,982 forms out of a total of almost 41,000.
Thank you for keeping a check on the electoral process in Kenya. While a significant number of forms may be missing in the portal, is it fair to observe that the hard copy format of the same forms are readily available in the polling centers and at the constituency tallying stations? A serious petitioner may/should easily retrieve the hard copies as evidence from the polling/tallying stations instead of pursuing the digital/scanned entries from the portal.
If hard copies are available at constituency tallying centres, the question now becomes – why have they not been uploaded? Must a petition be filed for IEBC to make key information regarding the electoral process available? The initial reason for delays was that not all areas are within network coverage. But, it’s been over a week since vote counting ended. What would be so hard for IEBC POs and party agents in remote areas to drive to the nearest town with network coverage and upload forms for verified results? Does that really take a week? When IEBC takes so long to make over 10,000 form 34As publicly available with not so much as an explanation, this creates room for speculation. Could they be doctoring the forms to reflect the transmitted results? A few of the forms I have checked, which are yet to be uploaded, have electronic results posted on IEBC’s portal. IEBC said, that the final results will be derived from the forms. So, I don’t understand why they would not make every effort to expedite uploading of all form 34As. How do they expect to win public confidence if they do not avail such critical information? As much as I want to give IEBC the benefit of the doubt, they have failed when it comes to communication and creating a sense of transparency.
Easily? Across 200 constituency tallying centres and 40k polling centres. Be serious.
The electronic process was to manage/ eliminate tampering with hard copies and dependency on them. IEBC has failed miserably in this. This is not the petitioners’ responsibility but IEBC’s.
Can we please not be so mediocre in our thinking and analyses.
Good to know you are following up our ‘demo-crazy ‘. Here in Kenya those who vote decide nothing while those who count and tally decide everything. We have learned to deal with it. The same way Zimbabwe people have learned to live with their problems. For democracy to be in play in Kenya kindly give it some 50 more years for it to germinate.
The law requires that the forms are made available in a public portal for public scrutiny.As a matter of fact,the forms ought to have been transmitted together with the results from the polling stations!For one to argue that the forms are available at the polling stations is neither here nor there unless he/she has been to all the 40,883 polling stations!