By Alfred Koroma
The Chief Electoral Commissioner, Mohamed Konneh has said the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone (ECSL) does not have the mandate to produce the disaggregated data of the June 2023 elections.
He said Section 92 of the 2022 Public Elections Act does not require the Commission to produce the data, therefore they will not breach the Act.
Konneh was speaking to the media at the Commission’s head office on Monday where he further pointed that the data was never provided in all the previous elections.
This is a data the main opposition All Peoples Congress (APC) party repeatedly requested that ECSL produce during the electoral period, along with projecting the tallying of the result. But the Commission never heeded the request.
Yesterday marks one year since the conduct of the widely disputed election that gave President Julius Maada Bio and the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) a second term in governance, after ECSL announced he won 56.17 percent of the total votes casted, while Dr. Samura Kamara, his main challenger from the main APC got 41.16 percent.
The Parliamentary results of the pools also gave the ruling SLPP a total control of the legislative house with 81 parliamentary seats and APC got 54 seats.
APC staunchly rejected the result, claiming it has been ‘tampered with to give the SLPP an unjust majority at all levels.’ This allegation corresponded with concerns local and international observers raised about the transparency and fairness of the election.
ECSL have denied all allegations questioning the transparency of elections, vote tampering, and systemic irregularities.
Speaking to the press yesterday, June 24th, Konneh said the 2023 result announced conforms with the standard of the announcement of elections results over the past elections cycles in 2007, 2012 and 2018.
He also announced that no over voting was identified in the election nationwide, describing claims of over voting as erroneous.
Despite not agreeing with 2023 election result announced by the electoral commission, APC Party refused to challenge the result in Court, citing lack of trust in the judicial system. Rather the party ordered it elected members not to participate in any level of governance, including the legislature and local councils.
This eventually led to the establishment of the Cross Party Committee on Electoral Systems and Management Bodies Review to look into the conduct of 2023 election and other elections previously conducted by the Commission.
