From Ballot to Constitution: How Sierra Leone's 2023 Electoral Crisis Became a Reform Mandate — and What Happened When That Mandate Entered the Constitutional Amendment Process

Résumé fourni par la source

From Ballot to Constitution is Part II of The Unreconciled Ballot, a People’s Court Special Report examining the institutional consequences of Sierra Leone’s disputed 2023 election. It follows the reform chain from the October 2023 Agreement for National Unity through the July 2024 Cross-Party Committee recommendations and into the constitutional amendment process. The report applies a documentary provenance test: what was agreed, what implementation or consultation was required, what subsequently entered the constitutional text, and whether the original recommendation was faithfully adopted, partially translated, materially mutated, omitted, or procedurally substituted. Particular attention is given to Recommendation 53’s presidential formula, Recommendation 78’s mandated national dialogue on PR versus FPTP, ECSL reform, presidential election petitions, candidate protection, election timing, security-force neutrality, women’s political representation, and the continuing requirement for polling-station-level electoral reproducibility. The report finds a mixed constitutional translation rather than a single act of verbatim “Tripartite implementation.” It identifies both substantial adoptions and material departures requiring a documented chain of custody between the post-2023 agreement and the constitutional rules under which Sierra Leoneans will next vote. A limited counterfactual applies alternative presidential formulas to ECSL’s declared 2023 dataset solely to compare their mechanical effects. It expressly does not authenticate ECSL’s declared 56.17 percent result or reconstruct the actual 2023 vote.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.