High Court rules on national tallying of Presidential results ahead of 2027 election

The High Court has ruled on the legality of Kenya's national tallying and verification of presidential election results.

In a judgment delivered on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, Justice Gregory Mutai rejected a constitutional challenge that sought to strip the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) of the power to verify constituency results before declaring a president-elect.

The judge in turn dismissed a petition filed by Busia Senator Okiya Omtatah, ruling that the IEBC is constitutionally required to tally and verify presidential results at the national level.

However, the court drew an important distinction between verification and alteration maintaining that while IEBC must verify and aggregate the results nationally, it cannot use that process to change figures already declared and certified at constituency level.

The ruling settles, for now, a major legal question over how presidential results will be processed ahead of the 2027 General Election, following months of debate over the role of the National Tallying Centre, historically located at Bomas of Kenya.

Senator Omtatah had asked the High Court to declare unconstitutional the national-level verification of presidential results after they had been declared by constituency returning officers.

The petition challenged Section 39 of the Elections Act and Regulation 83(2) of the Elections (General) Regulations, provisions governing the transmission and tallying of presidential election results at different levels.

His argument was essentially that the constituency should be the final point at which presidential results are tallied, verified and declared, with the national process limited to collating the results from Kenya's 290 constituencies and determining whether a candidate had met the constitutional threshold.

The petitioners argued that allowing another verification process at the national level created what they described as an additional layer capable of undermining the finality of constituency results.

Omtatah also sought orders barring the IEBC chairperson and other electoral officials from altering, re-tallying or further verifying results that had already been declared at constituency level.

The challenge came amid a broader political and legal debate about the National Tallying Centre ahead of the 2027 election, with other petitioners and political actors also questioning the legal basis and role of the national facility.

Justice Mutai declined to invalidate the challenged provisions holding that national tallying and verification form part of the constitutional and statutory framework governing presidential elections.

The court described tallying as the arithmetic aggregation of constituency figures into county and national totals, while verification involves checking whether those aggregated figures correspond with the results declared and certified at constituency level.

“The tally and verify function is accordingly not an unconstitutional intrusion upon the constituency finality,” Justice Mutai said.

According to the ruling IEBC cannot use verification as an opportunity to “add, subtract, multiply, divide, cancel or otherwise revise any individual constituency figures,” the judge held.

The court preserved the national tallying framework while simultaneously affirming the finality of results already declared and certified by constituency returning officers.

At the same time, the court directed that certified Forms 34A and 34B, or their successors, displayed at constituency tallying centres should serve as the primary reference documents during national aggregation.

It also ordered that national verification be undertaken collectively by the IEBC, with all commissioners participating and having access to the underlying data.

Candidates' agents and observers should similarly have real-time access to the same data available to the commission during the national tallying and verification exercise.

The court further addressed possible differences between electronically transmitted results and physical records.

Where such a discrepancy occurs, IEBC must document the difference, explain how it was resolved and make that record public by the time the final presidential result is declared.

The legal controversy follows previous presidential election disputes over the transmission, tallying and verification of results.

The Supreme Court's jurisprudence has previously recognised a role for IEBC in verifying presidential results at the national level while distinguishing that collective institutional responsibility from the chairperson's specific constitutional responsibility to declare the final result.

The debate became particularly prominent after the 2017 presidential election, when the Supreme Court nullified the election and ordered a fresh poll.

In subsequent litigation surrounding the 2022 presidential election, allegations were also raised concerning the handling and transmission of Form 34A, the document recording presidential results at polling stations. The Supreme Court ordered scrutiny and recounts in selected polling stations.

According to the court record discussed in recent reporting, the scrutiny found no significant differences between the physical Forms 34A and those uploaded to the IEBC's public portal that would have affected the overall election outcome.