Kenya’s presidential election is already a neck-and-neck race between William Ruto and Raila Odinga as early provisional results continue to trickle in from across the East African country, following the close of voting, Tuesday.
The New Diplomat reports Ruto, 55, is the incumbent Vice to outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta, while ex-Prime Minister Odinga, 77, is a serial presidential candidate who is contesting for a record fifth time.
According to early results reported by Kenyan-based Daily Nation, Ruto has garnered 51.36 percent (789,510 Votes) of the votes uploaded so far. Odinga, an old war horse has registered 47.99 percent (741,719) of the votes reported as at 8.30am, Wednesday.
With the other two candidates — George Wajackoyah and David Waihiga — barely scraping 0.5 per cent of the total vote between them, the two main candidates kept exchanging the lead at just around the 50 per cent mark.
As projected by pollsters, Ruto on the UDA ticket, was dominant in his Rift Valley strongholds as well as the populous Mt Kenya region; while Odinga enjoyed the majority on his Nyanza bastions as well as lower eastern and the coast.
In a vote marked by a historic low turnout, the determining factor was how much each candidate would eat into the other’s support base.
In Nyanza, early projections had Mr Odinga retaining well over 95 per cent of the vote in Kisumu, Siaya and Homa Bay counties; with Dr Ruto managing similar dominance in Bomet, Kericho, Elgeyo Marakwet, Baringo and Uasin Gishu counties in the Rift Valley.
To win the presidential race in the first round, a candidate needs more than half of all the votes cast across the country and at least 25% of the votes cast in a minimum of 24 counties.
After counting the votes, officials will then take a photo of the final tally and send the image to both the constituency and national tallying centres.
To ensure transparency the media, political parties and civil society groups have been urged to run their own tallies using final results declared at the more than 40,000 polling stations.
But only the electoral commission can declare the winner of the presidential election after verifying the physical and digital forms sent to the national tallying centre.
In seven days, the commission is expected to announce the official results and return a winner in the election.
