UPDATED – Kenya’s Uhuru set to win presidential polls: reports

March 9, 2013 (NAIROBI) – The electoral commission in Kenya is due to declare Uhuru Kenyatta, winner of the hotly contested presidential elections held in the neighbouring country.

The Jubilee Coalition candidate, according to Saturday Nation, was last night announced to have obtained 6,173,433 votes (50.03%), out of 12,338,667 total votes cast in the March 4 general election.

Uhuru’s main challenger, Raila Odinga of Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) came second with 5,340,546 votes.

Both candidates have already met the other constitutional threshold of winning 25 per cent of the votes in at least 24 counties, according to media reports.

Vote tallying process, had earlier been rocked by controversy, prompting the commission to abandon the electronic system in favour of the more hectic manual counting.

Meanwhile, vote tallying continued until late last night, despite earlier pronouncements by the Independent Electoral Commission that Kenyans would know who their next president was, by Friday.

FRESH AUDIT

The electoral commission has now announced it will audit results of the presidential contest after errors and missed entries were discovered in the official tally.

The decision to audit the results, media reports indicate, is what delayed the pronouncement of the official presidential results on Friday. Results from each of the 290 constituencies are now to be audited and verified.

Earlier on, CORD party had complained that the commission had failed to include results from 11 constituencies in its final tally.

The constituencies whose results the coalition claimed had been left out of the tabulated results include Kitui South, Kubuachai, Changamwe, Kanduyi, Homa Bay ,Ganze ,Vihiga, Khamisi, Magarini, Kitutu Chache, and Mumias East.

(ST)