Kenya has sent four of her MPs to the United States as election observers.
The four MPs; Otiende Amollo (Rarieda), Jeremiah Kioni (Ndaragwa), Abdi Shurie (Balambala) and Senator Fred Outa will be observing America’s November 3 elections.
The top contenders are incumbent Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
Otiende will be representing the National Assembly’s Justice and Legal Affair Committee where he is the vice-chair while Kioni will represent Parliament’s Constitution Implementation Oversight Committee.
The will be in the US for five days.
They are the first lot to jet out of the country since the pandemic struck in March.
The four MPs will be accompanied by a team from the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) who will also be observing the elections, National Assembly Clerk Michael Sialai told the Star.
“They have been officially invited along with the IEBC to observe the US elections,” Sialai said. The US presidential poll is expected to close on November 4,” Sialai said.
Their trip has locked them out of the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) meeting in Naivasha where other parliamentarians are in attendance.
The team will be fine-tuning the recommendations of the BBI report presented on Monday last week.
Leading US media outlets have reported that there is an estimated 138 million voter turnout in the forthcoming elections.
This number is premised on a similar number of voters who voted in the 2016 elections when Trump was first elected.
Reuters quoted that there was a 65 per cent voter turnout at the time.
In various polls done recently, Biden took the lead while Trump followed second but there are fears of him (Trump) disputing election results should he be voted out.
US media indicated that in the last leg of campaigns, Trump had a daunting task in his campaigns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin which were critical in handing him victory against Hillary Clinton who was the Democrat’s candidate in 2016.
Already, scores have voted in areas that have the provision of early voting. The voting was done either by mail or in person.
