Post election musings

Musings rattling around in my brain after a pretty intense week:

1. How can the IEBC, which was responsible for tallying the votes, be the arbiter of whether the election was "free and fair"?
2. Did the media, "especially the local media", abdicate from its responsibility to protect public interest as the "fourth estate"?*
3. Why is it near impossible to get voting data at the polling station level in spreadsheet/database format to allow all interested persons to form their own opinions about fairness or otherwise?
4. After a long 20+ year struggle to get a new constitution with enshrined rights, why is CORD being maligned for exercising its right to seek legal redress?*
5. If the court finds that the IEBC carried out a flawed election/tallying and orders a new election or a runoff, will the IEBC be "independent" enough to manage the subsequent vote?*
6. When looking at the voting patterns and how regions voted almost to a person for ethnic godfathers, have we arrived at defacto 'majimboism'?
7. Why the frequent reference to "God"? If Uhuru is elected by "God's will" what does that implicitly say about the other seven candidates?
8. Ensuring this is ends up without doubt a truly free and fair election is in the interest of the Kenyan citizen and not necessarily in that of Raila or CORD.
9. It is irrelevant whether or not CORD will be able to bridge the gap in any possible run off, the election had rules and should be adjudicated by those rules. Now is not the time to discuss the costs of a runoff, that should have been done at the time of the drafting of the constitution (an instant runoff voting arrangement would have been preferable in my opinion).

* credit to others in social media

Calling The Election

OK folks, don't eat me alive (or do backflips)... 

I have been playing with data (I love data) from the Mars website, and it appears to me that with these three critical assumptions -- 
(1) that the provisional results reported are accurate, 
(2) that the county results reported are representative of the county as a whole, and 
(3) that the turn out in all counties is the same, then:

The worst Uhuru could end up with is 50.28% and the best Raila could end up with is 45.70%. Wow, UK has clearly won this election, but I would posit that it is too close to call it in the first round (any one or more of my assumptions may be off).

I used the confidence interval of proportions... Happy to share the spreadsheet, perhaps my statistics are not spot on, but seems clear to me.

Here's how I calculated it.

1. I downloaded the provisional results from the Mars website.  
2. I calculated the proportion of votes that UK, Musalia and RAO had in each county.
3. I then calculated the confidence interval of error for proportions from here and calculated the worst Uhuru could do per county and the best that Raila could do in the same county.
4. I multiplied those numbers by the numbers of registered voters and simply summed down.

Here is the file...

Comments, thoughts