Poll - Very tight race for Thika parliamentary seat.

An online poll conducted by Thika Town Today – 3T projects a very tight race for the Thika Town Constituency Member of Parliamentary race ahead of the August 9th General Elections.

The survey, conducted between May 15^th and May 18^th 2022 shows that if elections were held today, little talked about Juma Hemedi Mwaniki would garner 40.04% of the votes against former Thika MP Alice Wambui Ng’ang’a who would garner 35.23% of the votes. Businessman-cum-Bishop David Kariuki Ngari, popularly known as Gakuyo came a distant third with 15.97%.

These results come as a great surprise as most quarters have been projecting a race between Alice and Gakuyo, with no mention of Juma in the equation.

The outcome of the poll, which surveyed 914 possible voters, showed Juma with 366 votes, Alice 322 votes, Gakuyo 146 votes, Jane Kamunge 15 votes (1.64%), while 24 people (2.63%) said they would vote for other candidates.

28 others (3.06%) said that they would not vote with 13 people (1.42%) saying that they were undecided on who to vote for.

(THE POLL: If elections were held today, who would you vote in as THIKA TOWN MP?)

How poll was conducted

The poll was conducted via a US firm – Straw Poll that got worldwide acclaim.

For accuracy of the polling, the pollster made several configuration measures to ensure that:-

• There was a duplicate vote check based on IP-Addresses where one was not allowed vote more than once or for more than one candidate in this poll using the same device as it automatically records ones IP address.

NB: We took cognizance that the number of people who will attempt to vote with more than one IP-Address is minimal (at most 2%) as compared to the genuine majority who vote once and wait for the results.

• To avoid fake votes and ensure more reliable poll results, Virtual Private Network (VPN) users were not allowed to vote.

• The link to this poll was publicly available throughout the polling.

• Nobody gained access of the results before the final vote. The results preview was hidden from all the participants to avoid preempting the voting process and influencing the voting pattern.

• The poll was shared across all major Thika online and social media platforms, with the pollster encouraging the participants to share it to their friends and networks. This was to ensure that everyone and every candidate was accorded a fair and level playing ground to vote and share to possible supporters without favouring any political divide or candidate.

• On the first 24 hours, we opened the poll for anyone to add any candidate they wished on the poll but we later closed that option after all those who did so, either duplicated the ones on the poll already or added names of candidates who were not vying for the seat or had already withdrawn from the race.

NB: We never removed any candidate’s name from the list (if added) other than those who were ineligible as explained above.