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News > World

Kenyan Apex Court Upholds Ruto's Win in Presidential Elections

  • Kenyan President-elect William Ruto (L), 2022.

    Kenyan President-elect William Ruto (L), 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @africaniannews

Published 5 September 2022
Opinion

The seven-judge bench unanimously dismissed consolidated petitions challenging Ruto's victory for lack of merit alongside a failure to meet the evidentiary threshold.

On Monday, Kenya's Supreme Court dismissed petitions challenging William Ruto as president-elect, citing a lack of tangible evidence produced by the petitioners, presidential candidate Raila Odinga and his running mate Martha Karua.

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The seven-judge bench unanimously dismissed consolidated petitions challenging Ruto's victory for lack of merit alongside a failure to meet the evidentiary threshold. The judges said the petitioners also failed to prove that the voting exercise was marred by irregularities that could have compromised the outcome.

"We find that no evidence was submitted to show that William Ruto did not attain the 50 percent plus one vote requirement... the Court found that the illegalities and irregularities pointed out by the petitioners were not of such magnitude as to affect the final result of the presidential election," Chief Justice Martha Koome said.

In their petition, Odinga and Karua alleged that the final results announced by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) were not complete, adding that there were gross disparities in results captured by electronic kits and physical forms.

The consolidated petitions alleged that the polling exercise was marred by infiltration of votes' transmission technology, voter suppression, and ballot stuffing. According to Odinga, there were inconsistencies in voter turnout as captured by Kenya Integrated Election Management System kits and those captured manually. 

He said that the digital kits captured 14.45 million voters, representing 65.4 percent, but in the final results captured in the recorded forms, the total number of voters stood at 14.2 million. Odinga and his allies said that the IEBC was unable to account for more than 250,000 votes that were cast, excluding votes captured manually.

The Supreme Court, however, said that it found no significant differences found between forms uploaded on the web portal and forms delivered to the IEBC national tallying center.

"We cannot upset an election in which the people have participated without hindrance just because of dissonance at IEBC. None of the parties has flagged anything so significant that it would have affected the outcome... There were no unexplainable variances in votes cast for president and other elective positions," Koome said.

Soon after the ruling upholding Ruto as the incoming president, thousands of his jubilant supporters thronged towns and villages in his strongholds of the Rift valley and central Kenya to celebrate.

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