Kenya’s Supreme Court ordered the elections commission on Monday to allow the opposition, which is disputing the results of this month’s presidential vote, have access to its computer servers and electronic devices used in the vote-count. Election authorities say President Uhuru Kenyatta easily won a second term in the Aug. 8 polls by 1.4 million votes. A parallel tally by independent monitors based on a sample of around 2,000 polling stations produced a similar result. But opposition leader Raila Odinga is disputing these results, which sparked scattered protests in parts of Kenya. The protests, which dissipated within days, had raised fears that political violence could again destabilize the region’s biggest economy, as it did following a disputed election in 2007.
Odinga’s opposition coalition said in a court petition that results from more than one third of polling stations are “fatally flawed”, in some cases because of irregularities in the electronic transmission of copies of paper forms giving the results from each polling station.
The paper forms giving the breakdown of votes from each of the 41,000 polling stations were supposed to be signed by agents for each political party observing the process.
Full Article: Kenyan court orders scrutiny of electronic vote-count systems.
