Referendum fraud was isolated, punished, and not official Somali government policy.

Evidence

The consensus among the Somali people and the diplomatic community was that the referendum was free and fair, except in two locations in the South: Wanle Weyne and Itala. In Wanle Weyne, the district commissioner, a former pro-Italian named Ibrahim Police, told the illiterate and poor public that anyone who voted no would be counted as Christian. Moreover, both district commissioners stuffed ballots into the yes boxes to such an extent that, in the end, the two villages had more voters than the resident population. To be sure, these two fraudulent cases marred what was otherwise an overwhelmingly free and fair constitutional referendum. Nonetheless, when all is said and done, the majority of the electorate supported the constitution, and the significant negative vote in the central region of the North and the no vote in Hiran only underscored what became convincingly obvious: the two breaches in the South were not deliberate government policy, as minister of Interior Hussen immediately removed the two district commissioners responsible for the irregularities, and the Civil Service Commission demoted them. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 588