IEBC vice chairperson Juliana Cherera filed her response to the petition filed by Azimio presidential candidate Raila Odinga and his running mate Martha Karua, seeking to overturn the outcome of the presidential elections as declared by IEBC chairman Wafula Chebukati.
In her affidavit, Cherera claimed that Chebukati did not involve all the commissioners in making some of the Key decisions related to the August 9 general elections, like the printing of extra forms 34 A.
According to her, she discovered that when she visited Greece in company of another IEBC commissioner, Francis Wanderi, to inspect the ballot printing exercise by Lykos (Hellas) SA.
The second set of forms 34A were preserved in a tamper-proof box after various political parties raised concerns but it is not clear whether they are still intact.
She further claims that on August 15, before the announcement of the presidential elections results, Chebukati ignored all electoral protocols and continued acting on his own. She adds that he ignored her, Wanderi and the two other commissioners who rejected the final results.
He would later inform her, through IEBC’s Corporate Affairs Manager Tabitha Mutemi, to alert presidential agents to inform their candidates that the results would be declared at 3 pm.
Later, Chebukati called all the commissioners for a meeting in one of the boardrooms at Bomas of Kenya through a WhatsApp message.
“At 4:30pm, the chairperson proceeded to issue the Commissioners with a document containing what he termed as a summary of the presidential election results which he alleged he had tallied and verified from the backend of the server,” Cherera said.
“The chairperson did not indicate how the errors and concerns raised by the Representatives of the Presidential Candidates and political parties were dealt with.” she added.
Together with the three commissioners, they insisted that they had to tally and verify the final results that Chebukati showed them but he ignored their concerns and proceeded to announce the results.
“Together with Wanderi, Nyangaya and Masit, I left the meeting room after the Chairperson walked out of the meeting room after disregarding the issues raised by the Commissioners,” she said.
The four then headed to Serena hotel where they issued a statement rejecting the results of the presidential elections.
However before that, she noted that Chebukati had tabulated results on Form 34C pending results from 27 constituencies.
According to Cherera, the opaque nature was further displayed when the display of results from different areas on the screens at Bomas was stopped.
“On August 13, 2022, the display screens or results at the National Tallying Centre as they were being read out were paused and no longer showed the results garnered by the four Presidential candidates after the tallying of three million votes thereby denying the information to the Commissioners, observers, agents and the public.,” the affidavit read.
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