Breaking down NASA petition

The opposition eventually filed a petition at the Supreme Court challenging IEBC’s declaration of President Uhuru Kenyatta as winner of the 2017 presidential election.

After keeping their supporters waiting, some of who camped all day (Friday, August 2017) outside the Supreme Court buildings in the heart of Nairobi City, NASA lawyers eventually arrived at least an hour and a half to the midnight deadline to file the much-anticipated petition.

NASA agents’ intimidation and sabotage

NASA claims that they have identified “specific irregularities which include instances where Raila Odinga was denied votes and Jubilee’s candidate President Kenyatta added undeserved votes to his tally.”

The opposition coalition alleged that it has sufficient evidence that their agents who were in Jubilee’s Rift Valley and Central regions strongholds were forcefully sent out of polling stations and replaced by imposters who then went on to sign doctored result forms in favor of President Kenyatta, adding the irregularity was also witnessed in several other parts of the country.

“Data analysts have examined over 25,000 results forms for vote declarations and detected 14,000 of them with errors ranging from statutory documents not signed by returning officers, others not authenticated by official rubber stamp to others that did not have agent names or signatures,” read a petition statement from NASA.

‘Ghost’ polling stations

The Raila Odinga-led coalition argued that they have 443 instances of un-gazzeted polling stations and “one presiding officer’s name in charge of elections appearing in multiple stations at the same time, something that if NASA will be able to substantiate in court will dent the credibility of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).

“A sample review of 5,000 polling station results from NASA’s agents reviewed against those supplied by the IEBC showed a number of fundamental defects: the total number of votes added to Uhuru Kenyatta and deducted from Raila Odinga are significant, especially if you extrapolate this to 40,000 polling stations,” read NASA’s petition.

Further, NASA has noted that votes cast for president (15,588,038) exceeded those for governors (15,098,646) and MPs (15,088,818), reading mischief on the latest votes cast trends.

IEBC and Chebukati at fault

According to the NASA coalition, IEBC disregarded the law that requires them to consider a number of things before declaring results which includes voting, electronic relay of results by both image and text to tallying center and the display of the results in an accountable, verifiable and accurate public portal.

In addition, NASA claim IEBC decided to declare final results even when they had not got 11,883 polling station results and 5,015 Forms 34A which NASA claim represents some 3.5 million votes.

“On what basis would he declare final results when according to him, the leading candidate was ahead by slightly over 1 million votes? How would he declare results similar to the public portal when he has publicly claimed that the ones on the portal are not IEBC results, and without the benefit of the verification that was started and discontinued at the Bomas National Tallying Centre?,” NASA statement