Court dismisses Waiswa Mufumbiro’s election petition, upholds Ruhindi’s victory in Nakawa East

What the report says

The High Court in Kampala has dismissed an election petition by jailed National Unity Platform candidate Waiswa Alex Mufumbiro, leaving Fredrick Ruhindi of the National Resistance Movement as the duly elected MP for Nakawa Division East. The ruling, delivered by Justice Allan Paul Nshimye, rejected most of Mufumbiro’s claims that the Electoral Commission announced the result on incomplete and irregular tallying.

According to The Observer, Mufumbiro had alleged discrepancies in declaration forms, ballot stuffing, unusually high turnout at some polling stations, inflated votes for Ruhindi, and the exclusion of results from 22 polling stations. The court found that many of those allegations were not backed by sufficient evidence. It also noted that some of the documents relied on by the petitioner were photocopies that had not been certified by the Electoral Commission, and that key polling agents were not called to testify.

The judge did, however, confirm that results from 22 polling stations were left out of the final tally, which amounted to a failure to comply with election law. Even so, the court found that including those votes would not have changed the outcome. The judgment said Ruhindi still would have led by a significant margin in the January 15 parliamentary election, based on the figures examined by the court.

The decision closes the petition and orders each side to bear its own costs. In broader context, election petitions in Uganda often focus on whether procedural errors materially affected the result, rather than whether mistakes occurred at all.