The truth about elections, held to a single standard.

Decree no. 2024-106 of 3 February 2024 repealed the decree convening the electorate for 25 February. Law no. 4/2024, adopted by the National Assembly on 5 February, would have moved the poll to 15 December 2024 and provided that the sitting President continued in office until his successor was installed. On 15 February 2024 the Constitutional Council held that law contrary to Articles 27 and 103 of the Constitution and to the principles of legal certainty and institutional stability, on the ground that the five-year presidential mandate is constitutionally intangible, and annulled the decree.

On 5 March 2024, seized by the President of the Republic, the Council rejected 2 June 2024 as a polling date because it fell beyond the end of the presidential term on 2 April, and refused to reopen the list of 19 candidates it had validated by decision 4/E/2024 of 20 February by way of a consensus reached in a national dialogue that only two of those 19 candidates had joined. On 6 March, seized by sixteen candidates who had filed on 26 February, it held that leaving the date unfixed more than twenty days after its 15 February ruling breached the authorities' constitutional obligation to execute that ruling, fixed the election for 31 March, convened voters in Senegal and abroad, and provided that the President of the National Assembly would stand in if the presidency fell vacant before the elected President was installed. The Presidency then set 24 March by decree no. 2024-690 of 6 March 2024, published on 7 March, the decree the Council's proclamation records.

All candidates had conceded before the provisional national results were announced on 27 March 2024, and those results matched the projection published by the COSCE civil society observation collective. The Constitutional Council reduced the 72-hour window for contesting the legality of the election to under 30 hours, ending at midnight on 28 March; no petition was registered, and the Council proclaimed the final results on the evening of 29 March, opening the way to a handover on 2 April.

Of 93 candidacies filed, 21 passed the sponsorship filter; the sponsorship files of nine aspirants could not be processed at all because their electronic files were unusable. A collective of 41 rejected aspirants complained of a lack of transparency, pointed to possible manipulation of the software, whose configuration was not disclosed, and argued that close to 900,000 sponsors who could not be matched to the register risked losing their vote. The EU mission assessed those unmatched sponsors as mainly the product of data-entry errors and an over-strict software configuration, with no effect on the individuals' ability to vote. The mission records that of the eighteen petitions filed during the crisis most were answered, but that those on the conduct of the sponsorship check were either declared inadmissible or rejected on the merits without any ruling on the transparency of the check, so no judicial finding on that question exists either way. A parliamentary inquiry opened on 31 January 2024 into the conduct of the sponsorship check and the probity of certain Council members came to nothing and was replaced on 13 February by a judicial investigation confined to corruption allegations.