Kenya's Election Results.

After four days of delays Kenya's Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) have released their final tally of the votes counted in the nation's Presidential election. With a very high voter turnout out of 86% 12,330,028 votes have been counted.

They show Uhuru Kenyatta in first place with 6,173,433 votes (50.07%) and Raila Odinga in second place with 5,340,546 votes (43.31%). Taken at face value these show that Kenyatta has passed the 50% threshold needed to avoid an election run-off by a margin of just 8631 votes. However there is the outstanding matter of some 500,000 (4%) excluded ballots.

In response to the results Kenyatta has been quick to claim victory and declare himself President in a clear attempt to silence any further debate about the election results. Odinga however has not conceded defeat and has lodged a legal challenge with the Supreme Court on the issue of the excluded ballots and some 250,000 (2%) ballots that he claims were cast for him simply disappeared.

It is of course entirely possible that the computerised voting system did mistakenly count each excluded ballot 8 times giving an inaccurate total of 500,000 when only 58,000 were actually excluded. It is also entirely possible that all of these ballots were excluded for legitimate reasons such as a person failing to select a candidate or selecting more then one candidate making the ballots impossible to count.

However until these questions are fully answered Uhuru Kenyatta can not legitimately call himself President if for no other reason that it will seriously damage his credibility and therefore undermine his mandate.

(Originally Posted) 15:20 on 9/3/13.