Confusion is beginning to ensue from the IEBC’s protracted delay in releasing the final, confirmed results of the presidential election held on August 9. The status of the vote count has been the subject of conflicting reports.
In the most recent IEBC-verified Form 34 Bs, William Ruto is in the lead over Raila Odinga. According to Reuters’ nearly complete count of Form 34As, Ruto is ahead of Raila with 52% of the vote.
According to a preliminary IEBC total of all Form 34Bs conducted by Radio Africa, Ruto received 50.36 percent of the vote, compared to Raila’s 48.88 percent.
Ruto received 7,152,655 votes, whereas Raila received 6,942,708 votes, with 18 constituencies still to be decided (excluding votes from the diaspora and votes cast in jails). This represents a difference of 209,947 votes.
The vote total, which combines the Form 34Bs aggregated to the 291 constituencies and to the provisional national count, is accessible at https://elections.thestar.ke.
With 34, 815 ballots still uncounted from the remaining 49 voting places, Radio Africa is updating the final result.
However, since the IEBC has not yet confirmed and formally released all the Form 34Bs, care should be taken when interpreting the data.
According to the Form 34BS, Ruto received 50.3 percent of the vote.
In a press announcement on Saturday, Raila Odinga, the Azimio presidential candidate, and Royal Media Services, the owners of Citizen TV, called the election for August 9. Raila Amolo Odinga received 51.13 percent of the vote, while William Ruto received 48.22 percent, according to a press release issued on Saturday. S. K. Macharia for Royal Media Services and Gideon Moi for Standard Group both signed the news release.
However, none of the two media outlets has made public a complete count of the results by polling place.
The Form 34As from more than 46,229 polling places in the 291 seats are still being verified by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission.
By Sunday morning, it had made public the validated Form 34Bs (consolidated from Form 34As) from 135 of 291 constituencies, showing that William Ruto had 3,511,573 votes, or 51.3 percent of the total verified votes, to Raila Odinga’s 3,284,316 votes, or 48.0 percent of the total verified votes.
All Form 34As and Form 34Bs are accessible on the IEBC’s portal.
According to the compiled Form 34Bs, Ruto is leading the vote, as reported by the international news agency Reuters.
“Reuters news agency and other media outlets have been tallying results forms from 291 constituencies posted on the election commission website. These have not yet been verified, and this tally is running well ahead of the official one. As of 2100 GMT (Saturday), Reuters had tallied 241 forms, which showed Ruto in the lead with nearly 52.3% of the vote, compared to 47% for Odinga. Two other candidates had less than 1% between them. Thirty other forms could not be included in the count because they were unreadable or were missing information such as signatures, constituency names, or totals”, Reuters is declaring.
In surveys conducted immediately before the election, Raila Odinga was predicted to win with an 8 percent, 7 percent, and 6 percent advantage by TIFA, Infotrak, and IPSOS, respectively, while William Ruto was predicted to win with a 1 percent lead by Radio Africa.
According to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), Senator Johnson Sakaja has won the position of Nairobi Governor after receiving 699,392 votes (56%) to overcome his major competitor Polycarp Igathe (41%) of Jubilee, who received 573,518 votes. According to a Radio Africa Nairobi gubernatorial poll conducted in July 2022, Sakaja will prevail with 57 percent of the vote.
Source: The Star
