Odinga slams Kenya’s presidential election result as “travesty”

Kenyan presidential elections constituted “a travesty and a blatant disregard of the Constitution,” Kenyan opposition figure Raila Odinga said and added that he would challenge the results of the close presidential election with “all legal options available to us“.
Kenya was calm on Tuesday (16 August), a day after Deputy President William Ruto was officially declared the winner of the narrow election over the 77-year-old Odinga — a vote closely watched in the East African country that has been crucial to regional stability. But the tightly contested presidential election has led to growing tensions between supporters of the two main candidates, which has prompted religious and other leaders to call for calm in a country that has already seen deadly post-election violence.
Four of the seven commissioners abruptly announced that they could not support the results, claiming that the president’s final calculation was 100.01% and that the excess votes would have made a “significant difference“. Experts say claims of election fraud — or „the many flaws in the elections,“ as Odinga put it — are likely to see the results challenged in court. The Supreme Court will have 14 days to rule. Meanwhile, a group of independent observers has said that the just concluded Kenya’s presidential election corresponds to their own tally. The observation group by name of ELOG said they had dispatched over 5,000 observers across 290 constituencies in 47 counties in the whole of Kenya.