Kenya’s Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (Cord) and the ruling Jubilee Alliance are rolling up their sleeves for a political battle over the integrity of the electoral commission after an attempt by the former to change the country’s Constitution before next elections fell through last week.

As it happened, a verdict by Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) after its scrutiny of signatures collected by Cord to demand a referendum to change the Constitution was leaked a day before it was announced.

Two Jubilee Members of Parliament — Adan Duale and Johnson Sakaja — said on Monday that Cord would not meet the threshold of one million signatures required for its push for the Constitutional review, dubbed Okoa Kenya, to proceed.

This cast doubt on the independence of the electoral commission, with the opposition saying the outcome of the verification of signatures was influenced by the government.

In his defence, Mr Sakaja said that the opposition MPs had hinted that some signatures that had been presented to IEBC would not survive scrutiny.

“We had no clue about the outcome of the verification exercise. In fact, it is Cord MPs who told us that they suspected some signatures would be rejected,” Mr Sakaja said.

However, the opposition said it would simultaneously seek legal action to rescue its referendum initiative as well as a parliamentary motion calling for the restructuring of the electoral body.

Norman Magaya, the chief executive of Cord, said that the coalition would go to court to ask for joint verification of signatures together with IEBC. The coalition will also be seeking directions from the court on the next step permitted by law after IEBC declared that the Okoa Kenya initiative did not meet the threshold of one million signatures.

IEBC on Tuesday declared that only 891,598 out of the 1.6 million signatures submitted by the Okoa Kenya initiative on November 9 were valid, thereby failing to meet the threshold.

Mr Magaya said that the coalition will also be asking IEBC to clarify which register they used because the 2013 presidential petition had revealed that the electoral body had up to five registers.

IEBC had stated that some names did not have identity card numbers, some lacked signatures while 163,033 were found to appear more than once.

“In the case of verifying signatures, the Commission must attest, affirm and confirm with a high degree of certainty that indeed the supporters of the initiative as listed are registered voters. If there is any doubt about the authenticity of the records in as far as voter registration details of a person are concerned such records may not be included,” said IEBC chairman Issak Hassan.

But Paul Mwangi, the chairman of the Cord Referendum Committee maintained that IEBC was simply mandated to confirm that those who signed up were registered voters and not to be preoccupied with the authenticity of the signatures because they are not signature experts.

The IEBC on January 25 received $232,333 (Ksh24 million) for the verification exercise that was led by Dr Catherine Kamindo, the commission’s manager of research and development and Crispin Owiye, the head of investigations and prosecution.