Why Supreme Court nullified August 8 presidential election

Chief Justice David Maraga

During the last presidential election petition, NASA raised 10 key issues which convinced the Supreme Court judges to nullify the outcome.

These were, however, condensed by the judges into two categories. First was whether the August 8 election was done in accordance with the Constitution and election laws, and second was whether there were irregularities and inconsistencies that affected validity of the results.

One argument was that the IEBC allowed 14,000 defective returns from polling stations.

As a result, the total presidential vote’s casts exceeded those of other elective positions by more than 500,000 votes.

It was a contested and mysterious question that surprised even the judges. The judges put to task both IEBC and Uhuru’s lawyers to explain the discrepancies between the presidential votes and other seats, but none could give a satisfactory answer.

The next issue was the inconsistencies and discrepancies in Forms 34A, 34B and 34C. NASA’s argument was that information in Forms 34A was not consistent with that recorded in Forms 34B.

They also claimed that more than 11,000 forms were forgeries since they didn’t have security features and watermarks.

To ascertain this claim, the court ordered for an audit of the forms which proved some of the claims. There was also a dispute over relay and transmission of results. According to the petitioners, the entire process from polling stations to constituency and national tallying centre was not simple, accurate, verifiable, secure, accountable, transparent, open and prompt.

The argument was that votes reflected in the IEBC servers were not the actual votes, and that the servers were configured to have a constant variance of 1.4 million votes between Uhuru and Raila.

The next issue was on substantive non-compliance with constitutional requirement for presidential election, irregularities and improprieties in following electoral laws. As a result, there were claims that the presidential election was marred and flawed with massive irregularities that you could not tell who won the elections.

The other claim was lack of impartiality, neutrality, efficiency, accuracy and accountability from the IEBC.