Is Parliament about to switch off the live feed of election results? Headlines said yes. The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission said the reports were false. Both are partly right, and both leave out the one fact that settles it: the livestreaming provision at the centre of the storm has had no legal force since 2018. Here is what the Bill actually does, what the courts have already decided, and the questions that genuinely deserve attention
The Weekly Vision Political Reporter
Reports circulating on social media platforms in recent weeks suggested Parliament was moving to bar the live broadcast of election results as they come in from polling stations. Former Speaker and Attorney-General Justin Muturi weighed in publicly, warning that any move to end livestreaming would be improper, arguing that transparency is the foundation of credible elections.
Lawyer Ndegwa Njiru went further, telling his listeners on the radio that the media’s right to gather and report results from all 45,000 polling stations was under threat. IEBC chairperson Erastus Ethekon rejected the claims outright at a public forum, insisting the Commission had “nothing like that whatsoever” planned and had neither proposed nor considered barring media coverage of elections.
The claims trace back to a real piece of legislation: the Election Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, a Senate Bill co-sponsored by Majority Leader Aaron Cheruiyot and Minority Leader Stewart Madzayo. It is currently before the Senate’s Justice and Legal Affairs Committee, where public participation is under way.
Clause 19 of the Bill amends section 39 of the Elections Act, the section governing how presidential results are tallied, transmitted, verified and declared. It does four things:
- Deletes subsection (1D) and replaces it with new wording requiring the Commission to verify that transmitted results are an accurate reflection of what was tallied, verified and declared at the polling station.
- Deletes subsection (1E).
- Deletes subsection (1F).
- Deletes subsection (1G), the clause requiring the Commission to establish a mechanism for livestreaming polling station results “for purposes of public information only.”
- Deletes subsections (2) and (3) of the same section.
The Bill also amends unrelated parts of the Elections Act, including the definitions of “identification document,” “nomination” and “political party” under section 2, and introduces new definitions for “forensic image” and “registration of a candidate.” Section 44, governing declaration procedures, is also amended.
Here is the fact that both the alarm and the denial skipped past: subsections (1E), (1F) and (1G) have not been valid law since 2018. On 6th April 2018, the High Court, in Katiba Institute & 3 others v Attorney General & 2 others (Constitutional Petition No. 548 of 2017), struck down these provisions, introduced by the Election Laws (Amendment) Act, 2017, as unconstitutional.
The Attorney-General and the National Assembly appealed. On 6th October 2023, the Court of Appeal, in National Assembly v Katiba Institute & 6 others, largely upheld that finding: it confirmed sections 39(1C)(a), (1E), (1F) and (1G) were unconstitutional, while overturning the High Court on one point by holding that subsection (1D) was, in fact, constitutional and could stand.
That is why the 2026 Bill treats (1D) differently from its neighbours. It is not deleted outright; it is deleted and replaced with new text, because it remains live law that Parliament must formally amend. Subsections (1E), (1F) and (1G), by contrast, are simply struck from the statute book, because the courts had already emptied them of legal effect nearly eight years ago.
In other words: the clause obliging the IEBC to run a livestream of polling station results has not been enforceable law since April 2018, a position the Court of Appeal confirmed in October 2023. The 2026 Bill cannot switch off something the courts switched off first. What it does is tidy up a statute that has, on this point, been out of step with the law for years.
The alarm has largely centred on media access, journalists, agents and citizens watching results arrive in real time and comparing them with later official declarations. That practice is not, and never was, governed by section 39(1G). That subsection bound only the Commission, requiring it to run its own public information livestream; it said nothing about the media’s separate right to gather and broadcast results independently, a right rooted in press freedom guarantees rather than the Elections Act. Deleting a dead clause does not touch that right.
If the legal requirement disappeared in 2018, why has IEBC continued running a live public results feed at recent elections, including in 2022? The likely answer is administrative practice rather than legal obligation; the Commission kept the mechanism running voluntarily, even after the courts removed the statutory duty to do so.
That is the genuine stake in this Bill. Once subsection (1G) is formally struck out, there will be no statutory hook, dead or alive, even nominally requiring the Commission to maintain that feed going forward. Whether IEBC continues the practice by policy, and whether the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee’s public participation process yields amendments addressing that gap, is the live question for 2027 election preparedness, not whether Parliament is “switching off” something the law had already stopped requiring.
The Bill remains at committee stage in the Senate. It has not been passed, and no timeline for a floor vote has been set. Given the scrutiny already surrounding it, further amendments, potentially including revised transmission timelines or clearer public-transparency obligations, are considered likely before any vote is taken.
