Final voters roll unveiled

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 28 - The Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC) has announced that it will prosecute over 50,000 voters for enrolling more than once during the voter registration exercise that concluded in June.

The worst cases were of a voter in Kisumu who had registered 11 times and another in Mombasa eight times. IIEC Chairman Ahmed Issack Hassan said on Wednesday that the bulk of the anomalies were in the manual registration where 49,120 irregularities were discovered while in the electronic registration revealed 1,717 cases of double registration.

“Remember we had given a 30-day ultimatum and this number represents the hardcore cases who failed to volunteer themselves,” said Mr Hassan.

After the exercise in June the Commission had requested those who registered more than once to return their extra cards.

“We are in the process of building a register for persons who attempted to register more than once to not only prevent them from voting at the referendum but ensure they are also punished for breaking the law,” said Mr Hassan.

The new cleaned voters roll released by the Commission has 12,470,443 voters down from 12,656,451 that were initially registered. Besides the multiple registrations the Commission said 136,898 names were scrapped off since there were part of processing errors and internal inconsistencies.

According to the final statistics, Nairobi's Embakasi constituency recorded the highest number of voters at 287,429 votes, followed by Juja at 187,886 voters. Lamu East registered the least at 8,834.

“In the final register 51.25 percent are males while 48.75 percent are females,” said Mr Hassan.

The oldest voter is Alice Muthoni from Nakuru Town Constituency who is 119 years followed by Simon Waweru from Kamukuji Constituency who is 118 years old.

The Commission said all is set for next week’s referendum on the proposed Constitution. The Chairman said the Commission had already received the ballot boxes, ballot papers and other materials needed for the exercise.

“We have talked to the Police Commissioner and he has assured us that the security arrangements have been finalised,” he said.