News / Africa
Odinga hires George Bush's ex-lawyer, challenges Kenya election result
16 Mar 2013 at 09:08hrs | Views
Raila Odinga, Kenya's outgoing prime minister, has hired George W. Bush's former lawyer to challenge presidential election results in the supreme court, claiming polls were so shambolic they should be cancelled.
Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner a week ago after reaching the threshold needed to avert a run-off by a 0.07 per cent margin - 8,418 votes out of 12.4m cast, according to official results.
Mr Odinga said "rampant illegalities" made the outcome unclear.
"The prime minister wants a whole new election," lawyer William Burck, who was deputy counsel for President Bush.
"It's a bigger ask than a run-off but I think [a rerun] is what's required - an inevitable result of a catastrophic failure of the election system," said Mr Burck.
"We think . . . that this thing was never meant to succeed."
A biometric identification system to eliminate multiple voting largely failed and an electronic transmission system, to provide a speedy reference to cross-check paper results, broke down during the vote tally. The safeguards had been intended to prevent a repeat of 2007 elections, when allegations of massive fraud triggered violence that brought the country to the edge of civil war.
Mr Burck, who worked closely with the team that handled the "hanging chad" controversy, a reference to indecipherable voting intentions, that determined the outcome of the 2000 US election, said evidence of new problems was being unearthed every day despite "obstruction" from Kenya's independent election body, the IEBC.
"We're focused on the things we can prove dictated by the lack of time," he said.
"In the US, if you had such a fundamental breakdown . . . a US court would say this is not a reliable vote."
Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner a week ago after reaching the threshold needed to avert a run-off by a 0.07 per cent margin - 8,418 votes out of 12.4m cast, according to official results.
Mr Odinga said "rampant illegalities" made the outcome unclear.
"The prime minister wants a whole new election," lawyer William Burck, who was deputy counsel for President Bush.
"It's a bigger ask than a run-off but I think [a rerun] is what's required - an inevitable result of a catastrophic failure of the election system," said Mr Burck.
A biometric identification system to eliminate multiple voting largely failed and an electronic transmission system, to provide a speedy reference to cross-check paper results, broke down during the vote tally. The safeguards had been intended to prevent a repeat of 2007 elections, when allegations of massive fraud triggered violence that brought the country to the edge of civil war.
Mr Burck, who worked closely with the team that handled the "hanging chad" controversy, a reference to indecipherable voting intentions, that determined the outcome of the 2000 US election, said evidence of new problems was being unearthed every day despite "obstruction" from Kenya's independent election body, the IEBC.
"We're focused on the things we can prove dictated by the lack of time," he said.
"In the US, if you had such a fundamental breakdown . . . a US court would say this is not a reliable vote."
Source - FT
