By Collins Omullo
NAIROBI: Kenya’s electoral body is racing against time to beat tomorrow’s deadline to declare a winner from the August 9th presidential elections.
The verification of results has been stopped several times after complaints by supporters of the main candidates.
The Independent and Electoral Boundaries Commission chairperson Wafula Chebukati says they have had to make some adjustments to the verification process at the national tally centre to speed up the exercise.
He says initially, processing one returning officer was asking between 3 and 4 hours but they now do not have to go through verification desks before presenting results to the National Returning Officer.
By last evening only 141 out of the 265 returning officers had been processed, leaving 124 waiting.
Chebukati says the new verification flow now requires Returning officers to hand over their forms directly to him as the national tallying officer, and then proceed to the ICT desk for verification of the transmitted results in forms 34A against the original forms.
The IEBC boss says this will guarantee faster processing of the results and allow the commission to meet the constitutional timelines for processing presidential results.
