Mahat Somane: It is impossible to be issued a ballot paper for just one elective position

IEBC lawyer Mohat Somane at the Supreme Court on Thursday, September 1, 2022. [Samson Wire, Standard]

IEBC lawyer Mahat Somane has told the Supreme Court that there were no voters who only cast a ballot for the presidential candidates and left the polling station.

Somane, who is representing the IEBC in the ongoing presidential election petition, said that once voters walk into the polling station they are issued with six ballot papers for all the elective positions.

"If someone comes into our polling station we give him all the six ballot papers, he can do whatever he wants with them but he cannot go out with them," he said.

He said that in the event some voters chose to only vote for one or more elective positions and leave out some of the positions, the remaining ballot papers are then accounted for as stray or rejected ballots.

He said that it is a criminal offence for someone to walk out with ballot papers, adding that no one can vote for just one position after being issued with just one ballot paper for the said position.

Somane also revealed that the people who were identified through the manual register in the general election were 86,889 voters.

He said that the manual identification happened in 229 polling stations and those identified by the KIEMS kits were from 45,994 polling stations.

Answering a question posed to IEBC by Justice William Ouko after a presentation by Busia senator-elect Okiya Omtatah showed that 1,665,412 people voted after the closure of polling stations.

Somane said that the KIEMS kits send automatic returns to the IEBC Servers once a polling station has been opened depending on the strength of the network.

In the event, there is no network he said that the kits store the information for two hours which explained why some kits kept transmitting information long after the closure of the polling stations.