On March 9 William Burck, a litigation partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, picked up the phone. On the line was the chief of staff to Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga. Kenya’s election commission had just announced that Odinga had lost his reelection bid. His rival, Uhuru Kenyatta, had won the presidential race, and avoided a runoff by a scant 8,000 votes out of 13 million cast.
Odinga was looking for a way to challenge the results under a brand-new Kenyan election fraud law, modeled after U.S. statutes. His aide and chief lawyer asked Burck to describe how such a dispute might be handled in the United States.
