Friday 8 March 2013

Bizarre Electoral Logic in Kenya!

Uhuru Kenyatta is clearly running away with it! The only likely obstacle to his achieving the desired 50%+1 of the total vote cast and avoiding a run off, appears to be the bizarre decision to add rejected and invalid votes to the total vote cast. This to me is an entirely hopeless idea because an invalid or rejected vote is definitely not a vote as it cannot be attributed to any candidate. The legal test could be "to whom was it attributed". If a vote cannot by any means be attributed to any candidate in the relevant contest, such cannot possibly be regarded as a vote. To treat an invalid or rejected vote as a member of the total votes cast is to distort the integrity of an election because such votes have absolutely no value and are in fact, not votes at all! I would love to see how any court of law could possibly find that votes that are invalid or rejected are part of the total votes cast when in fact, they were never votes cast, for if they were cast at all they would have not been in valid or rejected. I think the smart thing for the Kenyan electoral body to do is to physically examine all the invalid and rejected votes with the view of finding the intention of the voter. This seems to me to be the only honest and intelligent way!