CORD demands ballot recount

Kenya’s Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord) yesterday demanded a stop to the vote tallying as the elections body maintained that the manual tallying was ongoing in a transparent manner.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Kenya’s Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord) yesterday demanded a stop to the vote tallying as the elections body maintained that the manual tallying was ongoing in a transparent manner.By press time, yesterday, Jubilee alliance’s Uhuru Kenyatta was still leading with 3,272,581 votes against Raila Odinga’s 2,949,191 votes."We as a coalition take the position that the national vote tallying process lacks integrity and has to be stopped and restarted using primary documents from the polling stations,” Odinga’s running mate Kalonzo Musyoka said in a statement.Musyoka claimed that in some cases, the total votes cast exceeded the number of registered voters. He identified the constituencies where this happened as; Kajiado South, Bureti,  Runyenjes, Wajir North and Kathiani.But the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission chairman Isaack Hassan said the ongoing tallying system has left no room for results to be doctored. "I don’t know of anything like that. We are committed to the oath that we took,” Hassan said.Meanwhile, the Election Observation Group, yesterday, called on IEBC to open the manual tallying process to thorough scrutiny to retain the transparency which should have been enhanced by the biometric system.