Rigging claims begin as Kenyan media slow tally of votes in tight presidential race
Rigging claims on presidential election results begin as Kenyan media slow down the tallying process of votes in the tight race.
Without providing any proof, the secretary-general of Kenya’s governing party has said the country’s elections were rigged, fuelling public anxiety on Friday as media houses significantly slowed down their unofficial tallies of the presidential vote.
Only the electoral commission, IEBC is authorized to declare a winner, but the tallies were seen as a bulwark against the kind of rigging claims that have previously sparked violence.
So far the polls were generally praised by international observers, but problems usually emerge after results are announced.
On Thursday, 11, August, the chairman of Kenyatta’s Jubilee party issued a statement alleging “massive subtle rigging” and claiming the “electoral process was highly compromised” after Ruto’s party made a strong showing in an area where the dominant ethnicity is the same as Kenyatta.
His alleged voter intimidation, bribery, illegal displaying of campaign materials in the polling station, mishandling of party agents, and incorrect use of election materials. It provided no evidence and did not explain why the allegations had been made so late. Party officials were unreachable for comment.
Media slowdown
Media tallies, which had nearly stopped by Friday morning, showed both leading candidates neck and neck, just under the 50% mark they needed to win.
Less than a percent was divided between two other marginal candidates.
If no candidate wins more than 50% plus one vote, the two frontrunners will have a run-off.
The electoral commission is the only body legally authorized to declare a winner.
It initially uploaded images of results forms from more than 46,000 polling stations but had not tallied them. Instead, media houses employed teams to download forms and enter them into a database.
More than 99.7% of polling station results are in but thousands have not been counted by the media. The abrupt slowdown started when around 80% of the vote had been counted.
Kenyan columnist and cartoonist Patrick Gathara criticized the slowdown, tweeting: “So once again KE media have chickened out and have stopped updating their counts? It was too good to last.”
But executives from Citizen and Nation media groups said exhausted staff needed a rest.
“Now we have about a third of people working that we started with and we intend to pick up pace in the next few hours when the rest of the team comes back,” said Linus Kaikai, Director of Strategy at Citizen.
Stephen Gitagama, the CEO of Nation Media Group, said his staff also needed a rest and that they focused on quality control. He referred Reuters to the election commission, known as the IEBC.
“IEBC bears the responsibility of providing the results, not the media,” he said.
On Friday morning, the election commission had finally begun displaying an official count of presidential results on a board at the main tallying center.
It had counted 1.5% of the vote.
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