NAIROBI, Kenya — The leader of Kenya’s opposition party said Wednesday he would challenge the results of last week’s presidential election in the Supreme Court, not in the hopes of overturning the outcome but as a way to expose evidence of widespread vote-rigging.
“Whether the court rules in our favor or rules against us, we don’t really care,” the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, said in an interview after making the announcement in front of supporters and media. “We want this evidence to come out so that people can know how they did it and who did, so they know that it was stolen.”
At the same time, he called on Kenyans to seek justice by practicing civil disobedience if the Supreme Court fails to give a fair ruling. “This is about the people of Kenya so that the Kenyans are justified to use civil disobedience means to seek justice if they don’t get it in a court of law,” Mr. Odinga said. “So we will use all constitutional means.”
The incumbent president, Uhuru Kenyatta, was declared the winner of the Aug. 8 election with 54 percent of the vote, surpassing the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff, according to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Mr. Odinga received 44.7 percent.
Almost immediately after the results were announced, Mr. Odinga and his supporters claimed that election commission servers had been hacked to award Mr. Kenyatta a 10-point lead. Mr. Odinga, a former prime minister who was running for president for a fourth time, described the election as a “fraud,” and insists he is the rightful winner. Days later, he said that he had won 8.04 million votes, to 7.75 million votes for Mr. Kenyatta.
Continue reading the main storyWafula Chebukati, the chairman of the commission, said that hackers had tried but failed to break into the servers.
Mr. Odinga’s allegations of fraud set off protests across Kenya, resulting in the deaths of at least 25 people, including a 6-month-old baby. The death toll is far lower than in previous elections, but there are some fears of renewed violence, given that many of Mr. Odinga’s supporters have said they will accept nothing less than his presidency.
Throughout his campaign and in the days after the election, Mr. Odinga insisted that he was the rightful winner and that there was no point in resolving the electoral results in court because the judiciary was biased. That created expectations among his followers — many of them young, unemployed men — for some kind of action.
“We must have justice before we talk about peace,” said Linus Amboka in Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi where a number of protesters were killed during clashes with the police. “If you stole something and yet demand peace, is that justice?” Another supporter, Frederick Ogendo, shouted, “No Raila, no peace!”
In 2007, a vote that was widely believed to have been flawed touched off spasms of violence that left at least 1,300 people dead and 600,000 displaced. Voting systems in 2013 were afflicted by widespread malfunctions that led to renewed accusations of vote-rigging, and more than 300 people were killed in postelection violence. Mr. Odinga has said he was robbed of victory because of vote-rigging in those last two contests.
So far, Mr. Odinga has not yet corroborated his claims that the results were hacked. But he said in the interview on Wednesday that he was “very confident” about the evidence, which he said had been provided by whistle-blowers working at the electoral commission. He has until this Friday to file a petition.
“This is a historic case, not just for Kenya but for Africa,” he said, and criticized observers for appearing to place more importance on preventing violence and instability over considering electoral fraud claims. “I believe the contrary to what observers say, that in Africa security is more important than democracy. African democracy must meet certain international standards.”
His decision to contest the results in court is a reversal from earlier statements, when he and his top aides had rejected calls to resolve electoral disputes in court, as they had tried to do after losing the 2013 election, saying they did not trust the judiciary’s independence.
In that race, Mr. Kenyatta won by a razor-thin margin, just enough to avoid a runoff, prompting Mr. Odinga to ask the Supreme Court to invalidate the election. At that time, the court challenge was hampered by the electoral commission’s failure to release all of the data from the polling stations.
“We had to go to court to get an injunction to get access to the data,” Mr. Odinga said. By the time the commission eventually came around to it, time had run out for the opposition to make its case.
This time, he said, the opposition is well prepared to challenge the results in court.
“The evidence is so clear,” Mr. Odinga said. “I’m very optimistic.”
Last week’s vote was carried out peacefully, and election observers widely applauded the electoral commission’s conduct, noting that the results were based on paper documents that were verified at polling stations, not on the electronic transmission of the votes.
However, the election commission has been slow to produce documents from 290 electoral districts on its website for public viewing, prompting criticism over its announcement of a winner before all the results had been tallied and ahead of the deadline.
The commission’s chief executive, Ezra Chiloba, has asked for more time to release all the data. Late Wednesday, the commission spokesman, Andrew Limo, said that the electoral body had only 1,200 results from polling stations to go.
“We have worked long hours into the night,” Mr. Limo said. “We should complete the exercise by tomorrow evening or very early Friday.”
The European Union’s Election Observation Mission urged the commission on Wednesday to promptly publish all documents online.
Troubling questions remain over the fairness of the election.
“We can see conflicts between Kenyan law and practices of the election,” Marietje Schaake, chief election observer for the European Union, said in an interview.
State funds, she said, were used illegally by the incumbents for campaigning and buying votes.
As public scrutiny of the results intensified, Mr. Odinga on Wednesday expressed confidence that he was the rightful winner and said his goal was to make Kenyan elections transparent and fair.
“I would like to be known for that,” he said, “for making fundamental changes to our electoral laws so that next time round it will be a level playing field, where people will compete, the winner will be known, and there will be no disputes.”
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the European Union’s election observer. She is Marietje Schaake, not Shaake. An earlier version also misspelled the surname of one of Raila Odinga’s supporters. He is Frederick Ogendo, not Agenda.