The tallying and verification of presidential election results — which started past noon yesterday — will not be televised.

That is what Prof Abdi Yakub Guliye, the leader of the team involved in the tallying told journalists and Kenyans during yesterday’s briefing at Bomas of Kenya, Nairobi.

Video recording or photographing of the officials was prohibited to protect their identities and ensure that they are not targeted in connection with or blamed for the outcome of the presidential election.

Original forms

Together with observers, party agents and other authorised stakeholders, Guliye’s team will go through all the 46,262 Form 34A and ensure that the results in the original physical form are identical to those transmitted electronically and which are available online.

But that is just the first of many steps that are likely to delay the announcement of the election results until later today or tomorrow.

Once the For34A are verified, the team will then countercheck to ensure that all the forms from every constituency are recorded in yet another form — Form 34b. This is the form that will be used to proclaim the winner of a presidential election in each of the 290 constituencies.

Yesterday, the returning officer from Butere West was the first to arrive with his forms, and therefore, the first to be subjected to the rigorous process.

Once all the Constituency Returning Officers arrive at Bomas and go through the motions, the chairman of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), Wafula Chebukati will take all those Form 34B and record each result in yet another form — Form 34C. This is the record that will have the magic number that will be used to declare the winner of this year’s presidential elections.

Authority to declare

So far, various individuals and institutions, including the media and political parties have done their own tallying. However, only one man, Chebukati, has the power and authority to declare the winner of the presidential election. Everyone else will be engaged in speculation. Their numbers will not matter even if they are accurate to the decimal point.

Yesterday, Chebukati said: “The tally across the media houses vary and we appreciate that this may be so because each media house is accessing the public portal of the results at different times and each is using its own criteria and sequencing”.

By 1pm yesterday, 46,105 Form 34A had been uploaded online, representing 99.7 per cent of all presidential election results. Only 157 forms were yet to be submitted. And they were distributed across the country. For instance, Baringo County was yet to submit one form.

That means anyone who had downloaded the forms and tallied the results would have been in a position to call the election. That is what some were doing on social media.

“I just want to inform Kenyans that the final announcement and declaration of the presidential results will be done by the national returning officer here at Bomas.sAnd although he promised to do his best to speed up the announcement of the results, he also warned that the earliest he could do so was today evening, probably tomorrow. That implies Kenyans should make themselves busy in the meantime.