IEBC did shoddy job in Okoa Kenya signature verification, says Election Observation Group

Elog Chairman Brian Weke. (Photo: File)

An election observation group has said the Independent Electoral and Boundary Commission (IEBC) did a shoddy job in verification of Okoa Kenya signatures.

The Election Observation Group (Elog) has once again put the commission on the spot, arguing that it had no depository account of signatures against which Okoa Kenya signatures were verified.

More so, Elog says, IEBC does not have mandate in the Constitution to declare the Okoa Kenya initiative a flop simply because there were fewer signatures than the set threshold of one million.

Friday, Elog Chairman Brian Weke said despite there being genuine loopholes in the 1.4 million signatures collected by the CORD-led initiative, the process of verification was conducted with no set guidelines to warrant fairness.

“Unlike banks that do have a backup depository of signatures, we observed that IEBC had no repository of specimen signatures to compare and verify the same. So on which grounds was the verification supposed to be done,” said Weke.

Weke said as an observer group, they did note a possibility of fraud from the signature booklets presented for verification but the State's decision to intentionally underfund the process raised more questions.

"Elog observed that some Okoa Kenya's signature booklets had similar signatures pointing out to the possibility of fraud. There were also a number of incomplete personal details such as identification numbers and names," said Weke.