Lawyer Mahat Somane has dismissed claims that the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) should be blamed for low voter turnout in five electoral areas where elections were postponed.
This is after Raila Odinga claimed the actions by the electoral agency to postpone the polls in areas perceived to be his strongholds directly impacted in the voter turnout.
“To the allegation that postponement of election in Kakamega led to voter suppression in terms of the petitioner’s vote being undercast, the allegation falls flat on the comparative data. In Mombasa, even in 2017, the voter turnout was low that data is available, it is always lower than other constituencies comparatively,” he said.
On allegations that forms transmitted as JPEG were changed, Somane noted that the petitioner provided misleading forms.
“The Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) kit takes an image, embedded in it (the kit) is a scanner so the image is scanned as a PDF. We don’t have any other output,” he said.
Somane was responding to claims that form transmitted as JPEG were changed and then posted as PDF documents to the commission’s public interface after being doctored.
“The Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) kit takes an image, embedded in it (the kit) is a scanner so the image is scanned as a PDF. We don’t have any other output,” he said.
Somane further disagreed with the submissions made by Senior counsel Julie Soweto alleging that there were 33 Polling Stations’ ballots in Kirinyaga county.
“If you look at the numbers of Kirinyaga there is no difference between presidential and the gubernatorial in fact the variance is 900 votes which can be explained, I don’t know what numbers they’re using; an old litigation strategy in numbers for shock,” he said.
He expressed confidence with the scrutiny being done highlighting the numbers will be the same as given by the commission.
“We want to confirm to the court that we have done an error report on every polling station in the republic, we are actually craving for the scrutiny report this will lay out that what Kenyans voted on August 9 is what was transmitted and announced by the IEBC chairman and that the will of Kenyans was carried out through and through,’ he said.