The Court That Cancelled an Election
On 3 February 2020 five Malawian judges annulled the presidential election their own head of state had won, and ordered the country to vote again. They read the judgment wearing body armour, and four months later the man who had come second was president.
The five judges arrived at court in Lilongwe under armed escort and wearing bullet-proof vests. There had been a reported attempt to bribe them and there had been threats. The ruling they had come to deliver ran to some five hundred pages and the reading of it took most of the day, and by the end of it the presidential election of 21 May 2019 no longer existed.
Healey Potani presided; Ivy Kamanga, Dingiswayo Madise, Redson Kapindu and Michael Tembo sat with him. The High Court of Malawi, sitting as a Constitutional Court, found the conduct of the election to have been so irregular that its result could not be relied on, annulled it unanimously, and ordered a fresh one within 150 days. This was the second time in African history that a court had cancelled a presidential election — Kenya's Supreme Court had done it in September 2017 — and the first time the re-run produced a different government.
The correction fluid
The case turned on paper. Malawi counts by hand at the polling station and records the numbers on result sheets that presiding officers and party monitors sign; the sheets travel up to the constituency tally centre and then to the Malawi Electoral Commission. What the petitioners put in front of the court were sheets by the hundred that had been altered with Tipp-Ex, sheets with no signatures on them, sheets that duplicated other sheets, and sheets whose totals did not survive addition. Nobody could explain who had made the corrections or on what authority. The declared margin was thin — around 38.6 per cent for the incumbent, Peter Mutharika, to 35.4 for Lazarus Chakwera, with Saulos Chilima third on about 20 — and the court held that irregularities it called widespread, systematic and grave could not be assumed to have left a gap that size intact. Malawians had already given the whole affair a name. They called it the Tipp-Ex election.
What a majority means
The second half of the judgment was the more consequential, and it had nothing to do with correction fluid. Section 80 of Malawi's constitution says a president is elected by a majority of the votes. Since 1994 that had been read as first past the post, and Malawi had accordingly been governed for a quarter of a century by presidents elected on 36 or 47 per cent of the vote in a fragmented field. The court read the word as it stands: a majority is more than half. Nobody in the 2019 field had one. The consequence was that Malawi now needed a mechanism it had never possessed — a second round — and Parliament had to legislate the machinery for one.
A ruling on ballot papers is a verdict. A ruling on what the word majority means is a constitution, and it outlives everybody who was in the room.
The appeal
Mutharika and the electoral commission appealed. On 8 May 2020 a seven-judge panel of the Supreme Court of Appeal upheld the annulment in full, and upheld the fifty-per-cent-plus-one reading with it. In June, between that judgment and the re-run, the government attempted to remove the Chief Justice, Andrew Nyirenda, by ordering him onto leave pending retirement; the courts blocked it. The point worth holding onto is that none of this was resolved by the street, by the army or by a mediator flown in from somewhere else. It was resolved by Malawian judges applying a Malawian constitution, against the express wishes of the government that appointed some of them.
The re-run
The fresh election was held on 23 June 2020. Chakwera stood at the head of a nine-party coalition, the Tonse Alliance, with Chilima — the man who had come third — as his running mate, which is precisely the behaviour a fifty-per-cent threshold is designed to produce. He took just under sixty per cent. Mutharika left office and Chakwera was sworn in on 28 June, five days after the vote. Later that year the five Constitutional Court judges were awarded the Chatham House Prize.
The test was five years later
A ruling protects an institution only if it survives being inconvenient to the people it first benefited. Chakwera's term was hard: inflation above twenty per cent for years on end, chronic shortages of foreign exchange and therefore of fuel and medicines, Cyclone Freddy in 2023, drought after it. At the general election of 16 September 2025 the voters removed him and returned Mutharika, at eighty-five, with about 57 per cent — over the line the court had drawn, so no second round was needed. Chakwera conceded before the commission had finished declaring the result, and said he did so out of respect for the will of the citizens and for the constitution.
That is the whole of it. In five years Malawi threw out a rigged result, changed government by ballot, redefined what winning means, and then used the new rule to throw out the government that had benefited from it. The country remains one of the poorest in the world by income per head and none of the above has fixed that; the fuel queues on the road south from Lilongwe are the same length whoever is in State House. But the judges went to work in body armour and delivered anyway, and the machinery they left behind has now been used twice by people who did not like the answer. That is not a small thing to have built.