Jubilee, Nasa claim 3.7m voters will boost their numbers

The Jubilee Party and the Opposition were on Tuesday embroiled in a supremacy battle, with each claiming that the just-ended mass voter registration worked in their favour ahead of the August General Election.

Both President Uhuru Kenyatta’s party and the National Super Alliance (Nasa) said that the 3.7 million new voters will boost their numbers, more so in a country where an election is won at the end of a voter registration.

Already, the Jubilee Party has put numbers to 17 counties it had classified as its strongholds, saying it had gained 1.4 million new voters in the just-ended mass voter listing.

In its breakdown, the Jubilee team’s analysis claims that their Nasa counterparts had 1.2 million new voters by the end of the 35-day listing that ended on Sunday February 19.

Last week, the Nation obtained a strategy document by the party which classified 17 counties in Rift Valley and Central as pro-Jubilee, 17 others as pro-Nasa while 13 were listed as the swing vote in the August 8 General Election.

To be declared President, one must garner at least 50 per cent plus one of the votes cast, in addition to garnering at least 25 per cent of the total vote in more than half of the 47 counties.

Mr Kenyatta was in 2013 declared president with 50.07 per cent of the total vote, with Nasa now saying they had eaten into the 833,887 margin with which he had beaten Mr Raila Odinga.

And with the addition of Musalia Mudavadi (who had 483,981 votes), the Nasa team believes they are poised to win. And win big.

The Jubilee team, a new document shows, has now said that the battle for the 50 per cent plus one vote, necessary for one to be declared president, will occur in the 13 swing counties that registered 951,345 new voters as per Jubilee’s breakdown.

“Raila Odinga had rightly put it that the 2017 elections will be won in the days of the mass voter registration. We want to thank him for declaring Jubilee the winner, because we have amassed the numbers,” Dagoretti South MP Dennis Waweru said of the analysis.

But in a statement yesterday, Mr Mudavadi claimed that the analysis of potential vote numbers by Jubilee was a plot to rig the polls.

NARRATIVE OF STRONGHOLDS

“The narrative of strongholds is based on ethnic arithmetic that ignores the fact that the majority of newly registered voters are young Kenyans who have a bigger stake in the country than their tribal origin,” he said.

Ford Kenya deputy party leader Boni Khalwale also dismissed the Jubilee numbers.
“Jubilee is still dreaming and are lying to themselves using the 2013 figures. Narok, Kajiado, Nairobi are battlegrounds we will win” said Dr Khalwale of the Jubilee-defined swing areas.

With what Jubilee has counted as close to seven million votes in its strongholds, the Nation has established that the party plans to wage a do-or-die battle for the swing votes in the country with 4.5 million votes.

The party has classified Gusiiland, Maasailand, and North Eastern as the battle areas as it seeks to achieve the constitutional threshold of 50 per cent plus one vote to cancel a runoff.

In the document seen by the Nation, Jubilee has broken down statistics of how both they and Nasa, as well as the swing areas, did in the voter registration until February 19 when listing closed.

Jubilee’s biggest advantage in the swing vote areas, insiders said, was that Nasa will field candidates from the different constituent parties of ODM, Ford Kenya, Amani National Congress, and Wiper.