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World Service,3 mins

Sierra Leone election count “was flawed�

Newsday

Available for over a year

One of the international election observers in Sierra Leone has said there were flaws in the process that led to President Julius Maada Bio's re-election, though he had no idea whether this changed the result. Cameron Hume, a former US ambassador who led the Carter Centre delegation, said there had been problems with the counting process as his monitoring team had seen ballot boxes with seals already broken. He also said counting centres had broken a promise to post data on the walls as ballots were tallied. Mr Hume said that these flaws made it unsurprising that the opposition candidate, Samura Kamara, had rejected the result in which officially, President Bio secured 56% of the vote. He told Newsday: “It’s not that we know that Kamara did better…it’s that the results are somewhat uncertain because of flaws in how the ballots were counted.� (Picture: Shows election officials counting votes at a polling station in Freetown on June 24, 2023. Credit: John Wessels / AFP via Getty Images.)

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