Raila Odinga, the party leader for the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) attended a meeting on Monday, January 25, with other senior party officials to discuss setting up their own electronic vote counting system for the 2017 general elections.
The system would run parallel to the vote counting system run by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).
Raila and party officials are further planning to deploy an official from CORD to every polling station across Kenya during the election.
The plans emerged after the former prime minister attended a meeting known as ‘Politiburo’ among party officials in Naivasha.
So how exactly would the parallel voting system work? A central command centre to tally the votes would be set up in Nairobi, with results coming in from various polling stations around the country.
The voting system won’t be Kenyan made however. Later this week, Junet Mohamed, the ODM Director of Elections, will travel to Germany to finish talks with a German company that would make the vote tallying system.
Raila is focused on coming out victorious in the upcoming election.
One party official who attended the Naivasha meeting told The Standard about the initiatives ODM will implement in the upcoming election: “We are a political party in competition and we must strategise on how to take power. We want to ensure that nothing is left to chance. In the last general elections, there were issues but we have learned from them.”
Raila has long taken issue with the way IEBC handles Kenya’s elections.
On Monday, January 25, the head of the CORD Secretariat Norman Magaya said that they would not accept IEBC’s financial shortage as an excuse to delay verification of the Okoa Kenya signatures.
The leaders further claimed that the IEBC was attempting to thwart the Okoa Kenya Initiative.
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