Raila Odinga challenges Kenya election result
Raila Odinga, who came second in Kenya’s presidential election, has filed a legal case challenging the result, his lawyers have said.
According to the electoral commission, Odinga took 48.8% of the vote, losing to William Ruto’s 50.5%.
However, four of the seven electoral commissioners refused to endorse the outcome alleging that the way the final results were tallied was “opaque”.
The seven judges at the Supreme Court will have 14 days to make a ruling.
One of the arguments that Odinga is putting forward is that the voter turnout figure was manipulated. The allegation is that that number was altered to show that Ruto had crossed the 50%-plus-one-vote threshold needed to avoid a second-round run-off.
Supporters of Odinga gathered outside the court in a suburb of the capital, Nairobi, on Monday morning waiting for the lawyers to hand over the physical documents. Their placards read: “Protect our Vote” and “Electoral Justice Now!”
They cheered and chanted as the presidential candidate and his running mate, Martha Karua, arrived at the court to formally submit the case.
Speaking last week, Odinga described the result as a “travesty”, adding that the election should be declared “null and void”.
This is the third time in a row that he has gone to court to get an outcome overturned.
In 2017, the veteran politician successfully challenged the result of that year’s presidential election, which he lost to Uhuru Kenyatta, and the Supreme Court ordered a re-run. The case highlighted logistical issues in the way the results were collated.
This time the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) tried to make the results process as transparent as possible by publishing the polling station tallies as soon as they were available.
An independent Kenyan monitoring group said the IEBC’s final result was in line with its own projection.
A week ago, there were chaotic scenes at the national tallying center moments before the final result of the 9 August poll was about to be read out.
Agencies