Lawyers representing President Uhuru Kenyatta were on Tuesday embarrassed in court after they ineptly struggled to define a term they used while speaking of ballot papers used during the 2017 General Election.
The court room was thrown into disarray after the President's lawyers were asked to define what they meant by the term "stray ballots".
The lawyers, Fred Ngatia and Ahmednasir Abdullahi, had claimed that during the 2017 elections, many voters opted to vote for the presidential candidate as opposed to politicians vying for other positions.
According to the lawyers, voters may have received all six ballots but only placed a mark on the presidential ballot leaving five others unmarked.
Justice Philomena Mwilu then tasked the lawyers to explain how the five unmarked ballot papers were accounted for.
Mr Ngatia shied away from the question, asking lawyer Tom Macharia to step in for him in responding to the Judge's question.
"The format of voting prescribed by law is that you're given all six but provisions are made for what are referred to as stray ballots," Mr Macharia began to explain.
The lawyer then veered off tangent explaining that because the laws outlined that presidential ballots are tallied first, then the stray ballots had not been counted.
"Are you making the assumption that the voter votes for his preferred candidate and places all six in one ballot box," Justice Mwilu asked, in an effort to bring relevance to Mr Macharia's claim.
Mr Macharia, acknowledging that he could not answer the question, then gave way to IEBC lawyer Karori Kamau who set the record straight.
"The simple answer is, all ballots put in any box and are found to be unmarked, they are categorized as rejected votes," Mr Karori clarified.
The IEBC lawyer further stated that the voter has a choice and can decide not to vote for other candidates and deposit all the ballots in one box.
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