IIEC given thumbs up

Written By:KBC reporters , Posted: Wed, Aug 04, 2010


With slightly more than one hour to go before voting in the referendum on the proposed constitution comes to a close, the Interim Independent Electoral Commission has been given a thumbs up for the way the exercise has been carried out.

This is despite minor hitches witnessed at various polling centers country wide during Wednesday's historical referendum vote.

It was a litmus test for the IIEC which is conducting its first country wide polls of this magnitude since its inception after the dissolution of the Electoral Commission of Kenya following the disputed results of the 2007 general elections.

United States ambassador to Kenya Michael Ranneberger, one of the international accredited observers says there has been much improvement in preparations for the poll compared to the last general elections.

By four o'clock local time the long queues had dwindled and only a few voters continued trickling in to the polling centres in many parts of the country amid concerns that this might mean the expected large voter turn out did not materialise.

There were a few cases in some polling centers where voters were turned away with their names missing from the voter registers.

There was confusion at Donholm Primary school in Nairobi where at least 2000 voters who had started queuing before 6 am could not get their names in the voting registers. Some of the disgruntled voters threw away or tore up their voting cards in frustration while the IIEC officials frantically searched for the names in the registers.

The IIEC also received praise from the Election Observation Group ELOG. The organisation's chairperson Kennedy Masime said that the only hitches they had experienced as an observation body is the fact that their observers were denied entry at some polling stations.

Meanwhile at least eleven voters have been locked out of the ongoing referendum voting exercise for various election offences in various polling stations in Mombasa.

While some of the voters had invalid documents, others tried to vote using expired identification documents or duplicates.

Deputy presiding officer at the Ganjoni chief's office in Likoni constituency Ms Rukia Ibrahim said they turned away a voter for using an expired passport while at the Sacred Heart School a voter was turned away for the same reason even as two others were also turned away.