Signatures submitted by the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) Secretariat to the IEBC on Thursday, December 10, were slashed from the 5.2 million initially collected.
Speaking at the IEBC offices in Anniversary Towers, BBI Secretariat Co-Chair Dennis Waweru revealed that they had slashed the signatures to 4.4 million.
The team weeded out more than 800,000 signatures during an internal verification exercise to fine-tune the documents.
The 800,000 signatures were deleted due to errors and inconsistencies.
“We want to have clean data. The IEBC gave us a format and that is what we followed,” Waweru had explained.
For ease of processing and verification of the signatures, the team also delivered the forms in soft copy via a hard drive handed to IEBC Chair Wafula Chebukati.
After receiving the signatures, Chebukati stated that the verification process would only start when the National Treasury avails the budget.
The electoral commission will also confirm whether the Bill delivered today is the same as the one Kenyans signed to support.
“We have received the sample signatures. There will be a team waiting for you upstairs to go through the processes of handing over the main bulk of the signatures. As a commission, our work starts here.
“We shall now proceed and request a budget from the National Treasury. As soon as we get a budget from the exchequer we shall now get our team, the referendum committee, to verify the signatures. Of course, we shall not commence until we get a budget,” he stated.
Chebukati added that to prevent speculation, the committee would give periodic updates through the media. He, however, declined to comment on how much money would be needed in the verification process.
According to the schedule released by the secretariat in November, the process has adhered to the timetable which had predicted that the signatures would be submitted by December 10.
The draft referendum bill is scheduled to be presented to the various county assemblies which will be required to either reject or approve the proposals by February 19, 2021.
If more than 24 county assemblies approve the proposals, the draft referendum bill will be presented to Parliament for a vote by April 6.
If successful, the BBI team expects the IEBC to conduct a referendum anytime from April 6 to June 6.
