Kenyan supreme court voids presidential election
New vote to be held within 60 days
NAIROBI, Kenya — In a historic ruling and a first in Africa, Kenya’s Supreme Court nullified on Friday the re-election of a sitting president, ordering a new vote to be held within 60 days after finding that the outcome last month had been tainted by irregularities.
It was an stunning moment for Kenya, one of Africa’s most populous nations, and for democracy in general. Kenya’s disputed presidential election in 2007 set off bloodshed that left at least 1,300 people dead and 600,000 displaced around the country.
But this time, figures across the Kenyan political landscape, including the president whose victory was wiped away, appeared to accept the decision and called on supporters to do the same.
The ruling also offered a potent display of judicial independence on a continent where courts often come under intense pressure from political leaders, analysts said.
“It’s a historic moment showing the fortitude and courage of the Kenyan judiciary,” said Dickson Omondi, a country director for the National Democratic Institute, a nonpartisan organization that supports democratic institutions and practices worldwide.
He said it was the first example in Africa in which a court nullified the re-election of an incumbent.
The election on Aug. 8 was conducted peacefully and was largely praised by international observers. But David Maraga, the court’s chief justice, declared the result “invalid, null and void” after siding with the opposition, which had argued that the vote had been electronically manipulated to assure a victory for President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Kenyatta, 55, had been reelected with 54 percent of the vote, easily surpassing the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. His main challenger, Raila Odinga, 72, who petitioned the Supreme Court to nullify the election, had received about 44 percent, a difference of about 1.4 million votes. A parallel tally by domestic observers endorsed the official result.
The decision came as a surprise, even to Odinga and his supporters, who had complained about election irregularities. A top election official in charge of voting technology was killed about a week before the election, and although the casting of ballots went smoothly, the electronic transmission of vote tallies was flawed, leading the opposition to assert that as many as 7 million votes had been stolen.
The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, which was in charge of the vote, “failed, neglected, or refused to conduct the presidential election in a manner consistent with the dictates of the constitution,” the court said.
The six-judge Supreme Court found no misconduct on the part of the president, Kenyatta, but it found that the commission “committed irregularities and illegalities in the transmission of results” and unspecified other issues.
“Irregularities affected the integrity of the poll,” Maraga told a stunned courtroom.
A new vote means that candidates will have to start campaigning again and possibly raise millions of dollars: Elections in Kenya generally cost about $1 billion, including spending by the candidates during the campaign and by the government to hold the election.
Thousands of people in the opposition strongholds of Kisumu, Mombasa and parts of Nairobi streamed into the streets and whooped with joy after the news was announced Friday. Supporters of Kenyatta in Gatundu, his hometown, were subdued.
“I am happy to be Kenyan today,” said Odinga, a former prime minister now in his fourth run for the presidency. “It is a historic day for the people of Kenya, and by extension the people of Africa.”
Security had been increased Friday in opposition strongholds amid concern that a ruling in favor of either side could provoke protests or worse. Kenya experienced postelection violence after presidential votes in 2007, 2013 and last month, when at least 24 people were killed, most of them by security forces.
The election controversy hinged on two paper forms that legally validate the ballots — one from each of the country’s 40,883 polling stations and the other from 290 constituencies. Representatives from rival parties were required to approve the forms before they were scanned and electronically transmitted to a national tallying center in Nairobi, where they were to be put online immediately so they could be cross-checked.
But the electronic system, which had been overseen by Christopher Chege Msando, the election official who was killed, broke down. Therefore, only the results, not the forms, were sent to the national tallying center, often by text message.
International election observers were quick to praise the electoral body after the vote, saying there was no evidence that the votes had been tampered with at polling stations and that the paper forms would show clearly who had won. The observers assumed the forms would be easily verifiable and would be matched with figures texted to the tallying center by party officials.
But when Kenyatta was initially declared the winner, just hours after voting ended, almost none of the forms from the polling stations were online, even though the electoral commission had a week to receive scanned images of the results.
A couple of days later, the commission announced that about 10,000 forms were unaccounted for.
“The scenario was similar to that of the Bermuda Triangle, where no one knows how ships disappear,” said Pheroze Nowrojee, a lawyer representing Odinga and the National Super Alliance.
The electoral commission said it had presented the forms, a claim that was verified in a report by the registrar of the Supreme Court. However, that report found that a third of the forms had lacked security features like watermarks or serial numbers, which election observers saw as evidence that the forms were probably false.