How Kenya's election was rigged

Shashank Bengali
McClatchy Newspapers

NAIROBI, Kenya — The spark for Kenya's firestorm of ethnic violence was lit inside a cavernous meeting hall in downtown Nairobi, where election officials over four days doctored vote counts, dismissed eye-popping irregularities and thwarted monitoring by independent observers to deliver a razor-thin victory to President Mwai Kibaki.

Observers who were allowed into the vote-tallying center on Dec. 29-30, hours before the results were announced, said there was so much systematic fraud by Kenya's government-appointed election commission that it's impossible to know who really won.

The extent of the commission's deceptions has faded into the background as more than 800 Kenyans have been killed in ethnic clashes and police crackdowns. The events also have deeply unsettled the Bush administration, which has relied on Kenya as an ally in the war on terror and a bulwark of stability in East Africa.

Official results gave Kibaki an edge of 231,728 votes, or 2 percent, out of about 10 million cast. Initial results of an exit poll by the U.S.-funded International Republican Institute found that rival Raila Odinga had won by an 8 percent margin.

Election officials allowed five accredited Kenyan observers into the tallying center in Nairobi only in the final phase of vote-counting, and three of them shared their accounts with McClatchy. All said that the gravest cheating occurred in that room, where commissioners — all appointed by Kibaki — compiled returns before announcing them to the public.

The observers spoke in interviews and quoted from a joint log of their experiences, titled "Countdown to Deception," which Kenyan rights groups are circulating.

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