KENYA: Supreme Court hears election petition (Day 2)

By NATION Reporter.

Prime Minister Raila Odinga continues with his submissions in a case challenging Uhuru Kenyatta's election victory at the Supreme Court.

Mr Odinga's lawyer George Oraro has one-and-half hours to convince the judges to invalidate Mr Kenyatta's win.

After his arguments, the respondents including the Independent Electoral and Boundaries, IEBC chairman Issack Hassan, Mr Kenyatta and deputy-president elect William Ruto will have an opportunity to rebut the allegations.

On Wednesday, the PM said the electoral process was marred by fraud, opaqueness and other irregularities committed by IEBC officials.

While making his submissions before the Supreme Court, Mr Oraro said there was confusion as to the actual number of voters while alluding to the fact that there existed two voters’ registers, a move he described as illegal.

Mr Oraro said the electoral commission had, behind the backs of Kenyans, created a ‘special register’, long after the ‘principal register’ had been closed. The special register, the court heard, contained between 31,318 and 36,230 new voters.

“As at February 18, we were informed that the total number of voters was 14,337,339 voters registers when the registration process by the IEBC had been completed,” Mr Oraro said.

“The IEBC later on stated that the number had been amended to 14,352,533 in their affidavit, with an explanation that the additional number arose from the fact that there were 12 voters who had been included to vote in Soi constituency and a further 31,318 people whose biometric information were not captured during the registration process,” Mr Oraro said.

“This number, however, changed to 36,230 in another affidavit. Based on these figures, Kenyans are confused on the number of registered voters in the country. No one really knows how many registered voters are there.”

Source: Daily Nation (28/03/2013): http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/-/1064/1732700/-/b0nbgo/-/index.html