The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) chairman, Wafula Chebukati, has challenged media houses to be faster in tallying the presidential election results and relay the same to the electorate.
Addressing the press on Wednesday, August 10, Chebukati noted that the media ought to be fast in their tallying bearing in mind that the results being uploaded on the IEBC portal from the polling stations were final.
Mainstream media, including giant digital media outlets have been displaying different figures of the presidential election results, causing anxiety among Kenyans over the discrepancies.
According to Chebukati, the media houses should have tallied 97 per cent of the votes cast since that was the percentage of Form 34As that had been submitted to the Commission by the time of going to press.
"It appears the media did not prepare very well, the actual figures should be at around 97 per cent," Chebukati stated.
By the time of publishing this article, the Commission's portal indicated that Form 34As presented by returning officers at the county level stood at 97.84 per cent.
This is even as Chebukati stated that all forms submitted on the portal - which is public to all Kenyans - shall be used to declare the final results.
Both Raila Odinga of Azimio la Umoja and William Ruto of the Kenya Kwanza coalition are in a tight race based on the votes tallied so far.
Form 34A is the first form used to tabulate results of the presidential election. It is filled by the Presiding Officer after the counting of votes at the polling station.
It contains details of the votes garnered by each candidate and then details the total number of registered voters in that station, the rejected votes, the objected ones, the disputed and the valid ones.
The candidate or their agents are then required to sign and ratify that the contents of that form are correct.
Section 39 of the Elections Act provides that for a presidential election, the IEBC “shall electronically transmit, in the prescribed form the tabulated results of an election for the President from a polling station to the constituency tallying center and to the national tallying center."
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