IEBC to announce final presidential tally only
What you need to know:
The agency will collate the results and only declare the final tally, commission secretary and chief executive officer Ezra Chiloba has said.
This will be a departure from the past when electoral commissioners had to declare all results from the 290 constituencies before they could announce the final tally.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission has scrapped the periodic announcement of presidential election results from constituencies at the national tallying centre.
Instead, the agency will collate the results and only declare the final tally, Chief Executive Ezra Chiloba has said.
This will be a departure from the past when electoral commissioners had to declare all results from constituencies before they could announce the final tally.
The electoral commission has seven days from the day of the elections on August 8 to declare the final result and submit it to the President and Chief Justice, as per the law.
On Tuesday, Mr Chiloba said the commission had set up 338 tallying centres – 290 at the constituency level, 47 at the county level and one national tallying centre – for the polls and all have Internet access.
“We do not know how long it will take before the final result is known. But, since returning officers don’t have to travel to Nairobi we expect it may be fast,” said Mr Chiloba when he briefed the media about the commission’s plan on access of results.
He guaranteed local and foreign media managers, editors, producers and technical teams of a dedicated feed from the national tallying centre in Nairobi.
“Results will, however, be declared based on physical forms,” he said when he met the media stakeholders at Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi. “We do not expect any variances between the forms and the electronic data.”
'NOT MUST'
According to him, it is not a must for presiding officers to travel to the constituency tallying centre because results can be relayed electronically.
“Returning officers are not obligated to wait for the physical form from the polling station,” he said, adding that the Kenya Integrated Election Management System that the commission will use will make it hard to rig the election.
“Given the design of this kit, it will be very difficult to stuff ballots. We’ve built in a system for ballot reconciliation,” he said.
And in case the biometric voter identification fails, he said, an elaborate manual procedure would be followed.
