Senegal 2024 Presidential Election

Decree no. 2024-106 of 3 February 2024 repealed the decree convening the electorate for 25 February.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.

The EU mission dates the suspensions to 5 and 6 February 2024, a cut it puts at 48 hours, and to 13 February, each ordered by the Ministry of Communication on the eve of, respectively, the National Assembly vote on the postponement bill and a silent march called by the Aar Sunu Election civil society collective; Access Now recorded mobile data unavailable from the evening of 4 February until 7 February, and the ministry's own communique on the first suspension is dated 4 February. The mission found the measures disproportionate and contrary to the Constitution and to international standards, and states that the Supreme Court said as much in two orders on a telephone operator's appeals, no. 2 of 22 February 2024 and no. 7 of 14 March 2024; the orders themselves could not be obtained for this record, so that holding rests on the mission's account of them. The mission also notes that no orders setting out the legal basis were published, which in practice blocked third parties from challenging the measures in the national courts. Access to TikTok had been suspended from 2 August 2023 until the evening of 6 February 2024.

Campaigning ran from 9 to 22 March 2024, 14 days instead of the 21 the Electoral Code provides. Bassirou Diomaye Faye, whom the EU mission describes as the first Senegalese presidential candidate held in pre-trial detention, had spent more than eleven months in custody and was released on 14 March together with Ousmane Sonko, under amnesty Law no. 2024-09, voted on 6 March and promulgated on 13 March 2024, which covers acts committed between 1 February 2021 and 25 February 2024 in connection with demonstrations or with political motives. The mission records that several hundred Pastef activists had been imprisoned over the preceding years, that the great majority were freed en masse shortly before the poll and then under the amnesty, and that none of those cases had come to judgment. State television reserved its free campaign airtime to candidates in person, which excluded the detained Faye, though the regulator admitted his coalition to the campaign bulletin from the second day of broadcasting with campaign footage, and Faye spoke on it himself from 16 March.

The EU mission records that on 3 November 2023 the President appointed twelve new members to the Commission electorale nationale autonome without explanation, four days after the sitting commission had asked the Direction generale des Elections to give effect to a court decision reinstating Ousmane Sonko on the electoral roll and issuing him a sponsorship collection form. The mission describes the replacement as an apparent disregard of the Electoral Code, which provides for renewal by thirds every three years after consultation of legal, academic, human-rights and media bodies, and reports that many of its interlocutors read the timing as a reprisal. It notes that the previous members had stayed in post long after their six-year terms expired, the last renewal having been in 2015, which had left them removable at any time, and that the replacement may have deterred the incoming members from using the commission's corrective powers for the rest of the process.

On 4 February 2024, while the Walfadjri group was carrying live coverage of a protest against the postponement, the Minister of Communication had its signal suspended and withdrew its broadcasting licence with immediate and definitive effect, relying on Article 142 of the Press Code, which the EU mission notes confers a power to revoke a licence but not to cut a signal. The licence was returned on 11 February by decision of the President of the Republic rather than through any legal channel. The mission also documented around twenty cases of violence against journalists after the postponement was announced, including security-force charges and tear gas directed at reporters covering protests.

Under the rules applied in 2024 a voter's signature counted only on the list of whichever candidate was verified first, and the same signature was struck from every list checked later. The order of verification was set by lot, replacing the order of filing used in 2019. Because the stock of already-counted signatures grew as checking proceeded, candidates drawn late lost proportionally more sponsors than candidates drawn early, so validation depended not only on a candidate's own compliance but on how many other lists had been processed first and who was on them. The EU mission called this a serious breach of equality between candidates in its final report and a significant infringement of equality between candidates in its preliminary statement, and recommended that eligibility rest on objective, reasonable and foreseeable criteria. The mission also records that aspiring candidates had no access to the updated electoral register while collecting sponsorships, and that the configuration and operation of the checking software were never disclosed.

The compiled polling-station results were not disclosed to stakeholders at any stage, and the national provisional results were announced at a press conference on 27 March 2024 without the corresponding record being published online. The EU mission reports that the legal obligation to publish final results polling station by polling station had still not been met when it reported at the end of May 2024, and recommends writing an explicit online-publication duty into the Electoral Code. What did exist was a party-side check: the results sheet was posted outside 44 of the 45 stations where EU observers watched the count and a copy was given to every candidate's agent, which allowed the main candidates to aggregate most of the country's results themselves. At departmental tabulation, results were read aloud and keyed in once with no double-entry step, and the data-entry screen was projected in only 2 of the 32 commissions EU observers visited, which limited what agents could check against their own copies.

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.

EU monitoring detected fake polls on X and videos used out of context on Facebook and TikTok, and found that after the 5 and 6 February mobile internet cut suppressed the volume of citizen posting, old footage of large opposition protests and of clashes with the gendarmerie was republished as current events by Facebook and X accounts operating outside Senegal and at times by international media. Most personal attacks on candidates in the final week came from TikTok influencer accounts based abroad and from one pro-Amadou Ba Facebook page. The mission recorded no hate speech on the networks it monitored and concluded that the limited scale of these cases did not damage the integrity of the poll; the #SaytuSEN2024 civil society reporting campaign and fact-checkers reduced their reach.

Neither the Constitutional Council, the electoral administration, the CENA nor the EU observation mission documented interference by a foreign state. The EU mission does record that the data protection commission, the CENA, the electoral administration and platforms such as Meta and TikTok established no cooperation to secure the integrity of this poll, so no platform-side threat assessment of the election exists to test against.

EU observers saw voters in the Diourbel region receive money or food near polling places after confirming how they had voted. The mission recorded no major irregularity overall across the 406 polling stations it visited. It separately reports that many voters in the Keur Massar department could not vote, because the 2021 administrative redrawing forced a reprint of all voter cards there and not all had been collected; the mission does not quantify how many people this affected.