The four IEBC commissioners who walked out of Bomas and disowned presidential results now claim they were denied access to the backend where the tallying was being done.

IEBC Vice Chair Juliana Cherera, Justus Nyang’aya, Francis Wanderi and Irene Masit claim their Chairperson Wafula Chebukati was the only one who had access to the portal backend.

Speaking on Tuesday afternoon, they said Chebukati only showed them the final presidential results said to be from the backend and they were not allowed to peruse them.

They have termed his actions as illegal and the basis for their rejection of the presidential election results while poking holes in the declaration of William Ruto as President-elect.

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Juliana Cherera.

“The tallying that was being done by our technical staff was not known to the commissioners until around 4:30pm when Chebukati brought the results tabulated. He did not give us an opportunity to discuss the results.”

According to Wanderi, Chebukati only showed them each presidential aspirant’s results that he was going to announce but did now allow any discussion or perusal as required by law.

“We announced results from several constituencies, all the members of the commission, and once that was done it was going to the backend. What we’re saying is that that backend was the privacy of Chebukati, not the rest of the commissioners. It would have required for him to bring that backend analysis to the plenary to discuss and look at the results, evaluate and see what has been done at the backend - that is simple,” he added.


Cherera insisted that, despite the commission conducting the August 9 election properly, Chebukati did the final tallies in an “opaque” manner hence their decision to disown them.

“We have conducted the election and we did it to the best. We have improved in the processes as IEBC. We have upped the bar. We have considered the stages and processes that are supposed to be taken care of, but come to the last phase - the tallying phase - there was opaqueness. Things were not being shown to the public,” she said.

She went on, “At Bomas, the screens were supposed to show cumulative numbers of the presidential candidates’ votes as they garnered and as we continued to read the results…the same was not displayed to the public, and the same was not given to commissioners."

Cherera says the four commissioners and the public were kept in the dark on total verified and tallied results from across the country after the General Election done on Tuesday.

“Two days to the end, it was not given out. So, you could not clearly say that we have tallied 10 million, and this is how it is distributed,” she concluded.