Polls team pledges to audit big pile of rejected votes
Election officials and agents tally votes in Kericho County on Monday. Electoral commission has expressed concerns over a large number of spoilt votes. More than 307,288 votes of 5,193,434 ballots cast had been rejected by Tuesday evening. Photo/Stephen Mudiari
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Chairman Issack Hassan said more than 284,000 had been rejected largely due to misplacement of ballot papers in polling boxes.
Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has said it will conduct an audit on the huge number of rejected votes in the General Election.
Chairman Issack Hassan said more than 284,000 had been rejected largely due to misplacement of ballot papers in polling boxes.
“We are concerned with the large number of spoilt ballot papers. We will have a clear count of the number of rejected ballots at end of exercise,” he said.
Mr Hassan said that preliminary investigations pointed to the many ballot papers and boxes whose colours voters did not match.
“The spoilt votes are basically votes cast which are now rejected. They are either wrongly marked or wrong placement. There are incidents where voters cast ballots in wrong boxes,” he said.
Kenyans went to the polls to elect the fourth president, governors, senators, MPs, women representative and County Assembly members on Monday.
The rejected votes, according to Mr Hassan, cut across the six ballot papers cast by voters during the election.
“We are not sure whether the large number of ballot papers and the six ballot boxes provided contributed to the large number of rejected ballots,” said Mr Hassan.
“We will conduct an audit on the same to ascertain the reasons.”
During the 2010 referendum on Constitution, 200,000 votes were recorded as spoilt yet the choice was between a Yes and No. In the 2007 General Election, 137,504 votes were reported as spoilt.
The figure of spoilt ballots was expected to rise given that only provisional results from 10,000 out of 33,000 polling stations had been received at the national tallying centre at the Bomas of Kenya in Nairobi when Mr Hassan made the statement.
As we went to press 307,288 votes had been rejected of 5,193,434 cast ballots. The National Alliance chairman Johnston Sakaja blamed ignorance for the large number of spoilt votes.
“This is largely to do with inadequate voter education by the commission, illiteracy and the high number of ballots which confused voters,” Mr Sakaja said.
Mr Hassan said at the commission’s voter simulation exercise that was conducted in all counties on February 28, voters misplaced their ballots for president to governor ballot boxes and vice-versa.
He said the commission would count all votes cast, including the spoilt ones in determining whether a presidential candidate satisfied the 50 plus one and 25 per cent in at least half of the 47 counties to be declared winner.
“We will use the votes cast to get this including rejected and disputed ones,” said the IEBC commission chairman.
The commission said it had fixed hitches in its servers to allow steady transmission of provisional results.
