The Supreme Court of Kenya has kicked off proceedings on the presidential poll petition challenging the election of Dr. William Ruto.
On August 16, 2022, Wafula Chebukati, chairperson of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) declared William Samoei Arap Ruto as the winner of a keenly contested election in Kenya.
“In accordance with the law, I …hereby declare that Ruto William Samoei has been duly elected as the president,” he announced.
Ruto won the election by a narrow margin, garnering 50.49 per cent of the votes to his closest challenger Raila Odinga’s 48.85 per cent.
Chebukati’s announcement came within an hour after his deputy Juliana Cherera led three other commissioners out of the tallying centre to proclaim their dissent elsewhere in Nairobi.
“We are not at Bomas [tallying centre] because we cannot take ownership of the results that are going to be announced,” Cherera said at a press conference before the results were made public.
Raila Odinga contested the election results and later petitioned court claiming that there were just over 140,000 votes that were cast but were not included in the final tally, according to an extract from the legal documents.
Mr Odinga described the result as a “travesty”, adding that the election should be declared “null and void”.
In 2017, the veteran politician successfully challenged the result of that year’s presidential election, which he lost to Uhuru Kenyatta, and the Supreme Court ordered a re-run. The case highlighted logistical issues in the way the results were collated.
This time the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) tried to make the results process as transparent as possible by publishing the polling station tallies as soon as they were available.
An independent Kenyan monitoring group said the IEBC’s final result was in line with its own projection.
According to Anne Amadi, the Supreme Court Registrar there are roughly 20 petitions where petitioners seek various orders. She said the ruling will be delivered electronically to all the petitioners.
“We expect all the seven judges of the supreme court to participate in this matter. Last election cycle we had six judges. We have observers who are also judges from CommonWealth Countries led by Tanzania’s retired chief justice Mohammed Chande Othman,” she said.
