On December 16, 2022, the Secretary of the Interim Transition Governance Committee, Abdul Kargbo, read a press release on behalf of the Party at a press conference held at the All People’s Congress (APC) Party Headquarters on Railway Line in Freetown.

The public would be reminded that the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone (ECSL) had carried out a process it referred to as “Voter Verification/Registration” in preparation for the multi-tiered elections in 2023.

The APC claims that the registration exercise, which was held from the 3rd September to the 4th October 2022 (extended by two days), was intended for people who had already registered and voted in previous elections to confirm their biometrics, review their personal information, and make corrections or additions as needed, adding that it was also intended to register people who had not been registered previously.

The Party added that the ECSL allegedly carried out a 5-day exhibition/verification exercise of the provisional list of voters from November 24 through November 28, 2022.

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The APC claimed that after seeing those procedures in the field with the help of its agents spread around the nation, it concluded that both the voter verification/registration and the subsequent exhibition/verification operations were extremely troublesome.

It was emphasized that “in our opinion, both exercises faced self-induced challenges and were deliberately designed and employed to create an unlevel playing field to disenfranchise a certain section of the electorate at the expense of our party,” and that “with regard to the Voter Verification/Registration, it has become evident the data for thousands of citizens who had registered in the previous election cycle was either incomplete, incorrect, or missing from the register.”

It was mentioned that in many of those cases, residents were improperly directed to the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA), whose mandate does not include voter registration, rather than being permitted to make the necessary modifications or form a new registration.

The Party claimed that with regard to “First Time Voters,” the ECSL broke both its own guidelines and constitutional clauses regarding the qualifications and identification requirements for such voters.

The APC cited Part IV of Public Elections Section 24, which states that citizens must provide one of the following documents in order to register: (a) a birth certificate or a naturalization certificate; (b) a statutory declaration outlining his birth; (c) the testimony of a local council member in the neighborhood where he resides; (d) a National Identification Number; (e) any other satisfactory evidence of his entitlement to be registered as voter.

The APC stated that those provisions were disregarded and that rejection forms were not given to individuals in areas where the ECSL prohibited first-time voter registration.

It further states that the Exhibition/Verification exercise, which ostensibly ended on Monday, November 28th, revealed what looks to be an electoral plan to distort the results of the elections in June 2023.

“Once again, thousands of people who reported to the designated Exhibition/Verification centres found out that the ECSL retained incomplete and incorrect data,” it was stated adding that thousands of photos were absent along with names, addresses and other details being inaccurate.

The APC said that those instances involved the failure to provide impacted parties with correction to inclusion forms as required by law.

District terminated ECSL after determining that 607 registrations were underage.

Additionally, it was stated that ECSL removed 257,123 registrations, or about 7% of the total, which they claimed were duplicate voters. This deletion was done without regard for the districts.

According to the APC, an ECSL Press Release dated 30th November 2022 stated: “The Commission acknowledges concerns from registered voters relating to the omission of some names from the Provisional List of Voters, photo-less registration details and incomplete data in some centres….The ECSL is closely working with the National Civil Registration Authority (NCRA) to resolve this issue.”

The APC claimed that ECSL’s lack of openness, transparency, and inclusivity in its operations has seriously undermined the credibility of both the voter registration procedures and the Provisional List of Voters.

Furthermore, it claimed that the numerous difficulties the public ran into during the Registration and Verification exercises, as well as the ECSL’s lack of responsiveness to stakeholders’ concerns and the failure to address those, have seriously weakened the public’s confidence in the entire electoral process.

“We believe that these setbacks could result in significant voter apathy,” the APC lamented.

According to the Press Statement, the APC has good reason to be concerned that the public mistrust created by ECSL and their inability to carry out free, peaceful, easy, and credible voter registration and verification processes represent a denigration and shameful reversal of the country’s hard-won democracy.

It was also stated that the way ECSL has operated thus far and their steadfast disrespect for the law poses a severe threat to the peace and security of the nation by creating the possibility for extremely chaotic elections.

The main opposition party decried the fact that the APC’s complaints about these issues have not been addressed by the Elections Management Bodies (EMBs) or the ECSL.

According to the statement, the APC is forced to claim that the ECSL, as it is currently constituted, staffed, and manned, lacks the competence and trust to conduct free, peaceful, and credible elections in light of its current performance and posture.

The APC demanded the immediate disclosure of the disaggregated Voter Registration Data (Provisional List of Voters, the disaggregated Voter Registration Data (Provisional List of Voters and an analysis of the disaggregated Voter Registration Data (Provisional List of Voters and an analysis of the disaggregated Voter Registration Data (Provisional List of Voters and an analysis of the disaggregated Voter Registration Data (Provisional List of Voters and an analysis of the dis

The fact that Proportional Representation is a byproduct of its era and a fallback option in cases where the country lacks seats or wards for the sake of holding public elections was also mentioned.

It stated that this was the justification and the situation at the time that Section 38A of the Constitution, which was amended in 2001, was necessary and justifiable.

The APC said that the nation had recently seen a cruel and unstable rebel invasion that had left communities across the nation in a state of destabilization in addition to the loss of life and destruction of property.

It went on to say that the absence of settled communities and constituencies was an immediate consequence of such a circumstance, which provided the reason for the implementation of the Proportional Representation System.

The Statement claimed in its conclusion that it was not meant to be the standard model for public or general elections for Parliament but rather was considered as a contingency provision.