MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Somalia’s electoral commission said on Wednesday that it accepts the Supreme Court judgment voiding the Galmudug elections it ran on 30 July, invoking the supremacy of law and promising a fresh timetable at some later date. The NIEBC gave no date, and the court that annulled the vote attached no supervisory mechanism and ordered no observation, so the body whose work was struck down will conduct the replacement on its own authority. Nothing in the judgment touches the two earlier elections the same bench approved, in Mogadishu in March and in Baidoa in May, both of them run by this commission under this chairman inside eight months. The standards the court has now written down are the deadlines those two votes are documented to have missed.
What the NIEBC Has Accepted
Five judges sitting as the court’s Electoral Division under Chief Justice Baashe Yusuf Ahmed held on Monday 24 August that the Galmudug assembly and council elections were not conducted in accordance with the constitution and the electoral law, and that the defects reached the declared results. They found irregularities that could not be cured and voided the outcome under Article 82, which makes a breach touching the credibility or integrity of a result fatal to it. The commission had asked the court to dismiss the petition on two procedural grounds, arguing that it arrived out of time and that a result cannot be challenged when nobody complained on polling day. Both were rejected, and the second of them was the reasoning on which this same bench had certified the capital’s district elections five months earlier.
Wednesday’s statement accepts all of it. The NIEBC said it had reviewed the judgment and accepted its obligation to comply with the ruling, with the law, and with the principle of the supremacy of law, describing litigation as the proper route for settling disputes over results. It added that a new timetable would be announced later. That is the first substantive word from the commission since the judgment landed, and it arrives after two days in which neither the federal government nor the Galmudug administration said anything at all, and no international partner commented either.
The election in question covered 89 assembly seats and 243 council seats across eleven districts, and reached polling day only after two postponements. The commission recorded 197,971 ballots against 215,860 registered voters, a turnout near 92 per cent in a state where al-Shabaab holds rural districts, and handed the Justice and Solidarity Party 63 of the 89 assembly seats. Towfiiq, awarded twelve, published a parallel tally claiming forty-seven, demanded an independent audit of ballots from ten districts, and went to court. The NIEBC has now conceded that its own count cannot stand.
The Standard the Court Wrote Down
The judgment did something no Somali court had done before, which was to set out what the electoral law actually requires of the NIEBC. A polling date must be fixed at least ninety days ahead, and a meeting with parties that produces no written date does not satisfy the requirement. Campaigning opens forty-five days before the vote and closes forty-eight hours before it. Registration must be completed before the process moves on, with a provisional roll published within two months and the final register shared with the Interior Ministry and the parties thirty days before polling. None of that is novel law, and none of it had ever been spelled out from the bench.
Parties must lodge candidate lists 120 working days before the vote, and the commission must verify and publish a final list around 100 working days out. Results must be declared as named winners and the seats they hold, not as party seat totals. Station-level results must be posted and returned for every polling station. The court added that the NIEBC cannot vary a statutory deadline by its own internal regulation, declaring one such attempt beyond its powers, and that party members are competent witnesses against the electoral authority because those closest to the process are best placed to describe it. That last holding matters for every future petition, because party agents are the only people who watch Somali counts from beginning to end.
Every one of those requirements existed before Monday in the 2024 National Electoral Law. What changed is that a court has now enumerated them, attached a consequence to breaching them, and the NIEBC has publicly accepted the enumeration as binding on itself. A commission that has just pledged the supremacy of law is committed to a rerun in which the ninety-day clock alone pushes any lawful polling day well past the end of October, before a single other deadline in the list is counted.
Two Elections the Same Bench Approved
Banadir voted on 25 December for 390 district councillors across sixteen of the capital’s twenty districts, four of the largest having been excluded because they were created after 1991 and their residents directed to vote in a neighbouring district. Those four are among the city’s biggest hosts of displaced people. That election was run by the NIEBC as well. Its polling date was announced on 30 November, twenty-five days ahead of the ninety the court has now affirmed. The commission published its final candidate list on 24 December, the day before polling. No provisional or final voter register was published, only aggregate registration totals. Results came out on 27 December as party vote and seat totals, and parties complained publicly that they had not been told which seats each had won in which district, or the names of the winners.
Six days after that count the NIEBC cut the Waaberi tally of Hormar iyo Midnimo Qaran from 2,968 votes to 407 and moved the difference to the ruling party, calling it a data-entry error caught in internal verification. The party rejected the explanation and signalled a challenge. On 28 March the court certified the Banadir results on the stated ground that no official complaints had been filed during the legal period, which is the identical argument the same court threw out in August.
Southwest voted on 10 May, six weeks after the Somali National Army took Baidoa and the sitting president left office. The commission announced the date on 6 April for 28 April, twenty-two days ahead, then announced a postponement of the candidate deadline on 27 April, one day before the poll was due. Registration was reopened in Baidoa and Xudur for a further ten days inside the window the law requires to be closed. Results were declared as party seat totals on 14 May, from a turnout of about 35 per cent, and on 25 May the court found that the vote strictly complied with the legal framework. Two candidates had alleged tampering before those results were even announced.
A Rerun With No Referee and No Date
The court ordered fresh elections at the earliest reasonable time, left the existing Galmudug institutions in office until lawfully elected successors replace them, and stopped there. It attached no supervisory mechanism and ordered no observation, though the petitioner had asked for both. The NIEBC, chaired by Abdikarim Ahmed Hassan, who managed President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s 2022 campaign and was elected chairman two years later, will therefore administer the replacement for the election it has just been told was void. The International Crisis Group has written that the commission lacks clear independence mechanisms, and a European Union funded tender for an independent assessment of the Banadir vote, citing concerns over oversight and transparency, has produced no published findings.
All of this sits inside an unresolved argument about who holds a mandate to run anything. Parliament’s four-year term expired in April and the president’s in May, and constitutional amendments passed in March declare that both were extended to five years, pushing national elections into 2027. Puntland, Jubaland and the opposition reject the amended text. Talks between the government and its opponents collapsed on 28 July after more than two months of mediation by the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and Turkiye.
Two readings of the judgment are circulating in Mogadishu, and Wednesday’s acceptance strengthens both. One holds that a court striking down the government’s own election demonstrates that Somali institutions can settle Somali disputes, which is a useful thing to be able to show a donor. The other holds that a commission conceding one result while keeping two worse ones has bought a reputation cheaply. A British development minister spent Wednesday in Mogadishu telling the president that further support depends on political dialogue and on maintaining international confidence. The NIEBC has now supplied a demonstration of the rule of law that costs the presidency eleven districts it had already won, and settles nothing about the mandate under which the country votes next year.
