Form 37: A Governor Is Declared at the County, Not the Constituency

Updated 2 October 2026.

A county elects one governor. That single sentence decides the whole shape of the form.

Because the electorate is the county, every polling station in the county feeds the same total, and the declaration happens at county level rather than in any one constituency. Form 37A is the station's contribution. Form 37B is where those contributions are added up, and Form 37C is the declaration made at the county tallying centre.

What Form 37A records

The same things every A form records, for the gubernatorial ballot.

The station's identity. The registered voters for that station and the votes cast in it. Each candidate for governor, with the votes recorded against the name. The rejected ballots. The presiding officer's signature, the date, and space for agents to sign or to record an objection.

It is completed in the polling station on the night of the count, alongside the other five forms, from a separate count of a separate ballot paper.

A candidate for governor runs with a running mate, and the two names appear together on the ballot paper. There is no separate election for deputy governor and no separate results form.

So when you read a Form 37A you are reading the result for a ticket, not for an individual, and the deputy takes office on the strength of the same figures.

What happens at the county tally

Form 37B collates the station forms for one constituency. The county returning officer adds up the Form 37Bs from every constituency in the county and declares the total on Form 37C.

Nothing is recounted at this stage. The B form is addition, and the inputs to that addition are documents that already exist in copies held by the presiding officers, the commission and every agent who asked for one.

That is the entire audit mechanism, and it only works if the copies exist.

Why a governor's race is won and lost across many constituencies

Kenya has 47 counties and 290 constituencies, so a county contains several constituencies and a great many wards.

A campaign that covers its own backyard and leaves the rest of the county thin is not making a modest compromise. It is choosing to be unrepresented in the places where the largest share of the county total is being written down.

A governor's agent network is therefore a county-wide problem by definition. There is no version of it that can be solved from one constituency, and no seat where the gap between an ambition and a roster of names is more visible.

Related: how the A, B and C stages fit together.

The three documents a gubernatorial campaign should end the night holding

Form 37A from every stream it covered. Signed, dated, photographed and filed by station.

Form 37B from every constituency tally, and Form 37C from the county. The documents the declaration rests on.

Its own tally, kept independently. Built up from the station forms as they arrive rather than from anybody's announcement, so that the campaign knows its own number before it is told one.

A campaign holding all three can check the declaration. A campaign holding the third alone can only argue.

What it means when the A forms and the B form disagree

It means one of them is wrong, and the disagreement is the finding.

Because a B form is addition and nothing else, a county total that does not match the station forms feeding it cannot be explained by a difference of judgement. Either a station figure was entered incorrectly at the tally, or a station form was not included, or a figure changed between the two documents.

Which of those it is can only be established by putting the pages side by side. That is why the copies matter more than the complaint, and why the first thing a serious campaign does after a county declaration is compare its own stack of Form 37A copies against the figures on Form 37B, line by line, before anybody says anything in public.

The design of the form, its contents and the manner of completing it are all prescribed in the Elections (General) Regulations made under the Elections Act. That is the authority.

Descriptions of a form, including this one, are a guide to reading it. The copy the presiding officer signs and hands to your agent is the thing you can rely on in a dispute, which is why the instruction to agents is always the same: ask for it, check it, keep it.

What to do about it now

Take the list of polling streams in your county and put a name against each one. Not a target, a name.

If you cannot fill the list today, you have found the real state of the campaign, and there is time to fix it before 10 August 2027. A county-wide agent network is built over months of recruitment and training, and it is the difference between a Form 37B you can verify and one you have to believe.

Related: proving your agent coverage.