Election - 2013
On 04 March 2013, citizens voted in the first general election under the new constitution, electing executive leadership, parliamentarians including members of the newly established senate, governors, and members of the new county assemblies. International and domestic observers judged the elections to be generally free and credible, although some civil society groups raised concerns about irregularities and questioned the results.
In the presidential election, Jubilee Coalition candidate Uhuru Kenyatta was proclaimed the winner with a moderate margin over runner-up candidate Raila Odinga of CORD. Kenyatta received a simple majority at 50.07 percent of votes cast as well as over 25 percent of votes in more than half of the country’s 47 counties, without which the constitution mandates a subsequent run-off election. Odinga challenged the results in a petition to the Supreme Court, citing irregularities in voter registration and technical problems with vote tallying.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on March 30 to uphold the results. Odinga shortly thereafter accepted the ruling and urged his supporters to do the same. On July 29, an election observation consortium, the Elections Observation Group, released its final report on the elections, finding that they were generally credible despite being fraught with technological failures and a lack of preparedness by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC).
Voting and counting at polling stations generally were conducted in accordance with democratic standards, although there were some irregularities in strongholds of the two major opposing political alliances.
The country remained generally calm following the elections. After the court verdict upholding Kenyatta’s victory, followers of losing candidate Raila Odinga initiated isolated but intense protests in areas of Nairobi and Kisumu, destroying businesses and homes, blocking streets, and confronting police. Police reportedly killed five protesters in Kisumu and shot several others in Nairobi. The media reported dozens more were injured and more than 100 displaced during the clashes.
During the campaign leading up to the March 4 elections, there were instances of violence. On March 3, hours before the polls were due to open, coordinated attacks in Mombasa and at four Kilifi County polling stations left at least 10 security officers, a polling station official, and several of the attackers dead. One polling station was forced to close and others delayed their openings because of the violence. Some observers attributed the attacks to the separatist MRC movement, while others alleged that politicians had orchestrated the violence to depress turnout in the coast region stronghold of CORD.
Although the government required parties to register political rallies in advance, the government generally did not interfere with party campaign activities. Text messages, pamphlets, and blogs sometimes were used to disseminate hate speech that the election code of conduct banned.
To reduce voter fraud, the government instituted biometric voter registration of all citizens ahead of the March elections. Voter registration began in November 2012 and proceeded for 30 days; the electoral commission registered 14.3 million Kenyans. Possession of a national identity card or a Kenyan passport was a prerequisite for voter registration. The IEBC, census bureau, and Ministry of Immigration estimated that at least three million citizens, primarily youth, did not have national identity cards, while civil society organizations estimates put the number closer to five million.
Civil society organizations, international NGOs, and the donor community estimated that two to three million youths would not be able to obtain national identity cards in time to register to vote in the 2013 national elections. The electoral commission did not provide the breakdown of registered voters by age. Ethnic Somali and Muslim populations on the coast complained of discriminatory treatment in the issuance of registration cards, noting they were sometimes asked to produce documentation proving their parents were Kenyan citizens. The government was ill prepared to issue the large number of documents required for registration in a timely fashion, and many citizens lived too far from collection points to pick up national identity cards once they had been issued.
Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who claims that the project he led resulted in the company's unethical use of Facebook data to help elect Donald Trump, made a series of shocking claims in front of a British parliamentary committee on 26 March 2018. Wylie said that CA's elections chief Dan Muresan was found dead in a hotel room in Kenya in 2012 while working with President Uhuru Kenyatta's re-election campaign. Wylie said he'd heard Muresan was murdered. "Cambridge Analytica was working with Kenyan politicians, but because in a lot of African countries if a deal goes wrong you pay for it," Wylie said. "Dan was my predecessor....what I heard was that he was working on some kind of deal of some sort — I'm not sure what," he said. "The deal went sour. People suspected he was poisoned in his hotel room. I also heard that the police had got bribed not to enter the hotel room for 24 hours. That is what I was told — I was not there so I speak to the veracity of it."
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