By: Ilyasa Baa
The Electoral Commission of Sierra Leone (ECSL) has concluded the process of making the regulations for the conduct of the 2023 elections, hopefully, the regulations will be taken to the House of Parliament as prescribed by law.
Section 33 of the ECSL Act gives them the mandate to make regulations and take them to be vetted by law makers before being used for the conduct of the forthcoming polls.
The regulations, we have hinted at deal with the allocation of seats to each district According to the Commissioner North, Abu Bakarr Koroma, both the 2017 and 2021 census results will be combined and divided by two to allocate seats to districts. He said the law does not prescribe how seats are to be allocated “that is why the Commission will combine the two censuses and divide by two since those results have been contested”, he noted, adding that they want to make the process fair for all. He informed that the threshold for the 2002 district block proportional representation election was 12.5% adding that for the 2022 polls the threshold is going to be 11.9 % to secure a seat in Parliament.
Both the Parliamentary and Ward elections are going to be run on the PR system whilst the positions of Chairpersons, Mayors and the Presidency will be on simple majority and the system allows independent candidates to contest as well. Under the PR, if the independent candidate loses or fails to meet the threshold of 11.9%, his or her seat will go to the political party with the highest reminder.
From 24th-28th November, ECSL will display the provisional list of voters to be displaced in all the polling centres. Reports reaching this medium indicate that 225,000 multiple registrations took place whilst over 600 under age registered during the registration process. These cases were unearthed during a consolidation process in the presence of representatives of political parties.
However, political parties will send endorsed lists of names to the Commission signed by the Secretary-General when the time comes for that.