ANC takes 181 blocked councillor candidates to the Constitutional Court

The ANC has gone to the Constitutional Court to have 181 of its councillor candidates placed on the ballot for November’s local government elections, after the Electoral Commission of South Africa ruled the nominations were not validly submitted.

As SABC News reported on 26 September, the party says the candidates’ details and supporting documents were captured on the IEC’s system, but that administrators failed to click “submit as final” before the nomination deadline. The IEC’s position is that the nominations were therefore never validly made. The ANC is now asking the Constitutional Court to overturn that interpretation.

That is the dispute in one line. What it means for voters is larger than it looks.

A local government election is fought ward by ward and municipality by municipality. A party’s councillor candidate list is not a formality. It is the ballot itself. Where a candidate is missing from the list, the party’s name is missing from that ward’s ballot paper, and voters in that ward cannot choose it there. With 181 candidates affected, the practical question is how many wards would go into the November poll without an ANC name on the paper at all, and whether any of those wards would then be decided by a rival party or an independent candidate on a lower share of the vote than the ANC would otherwise have taken.

The IEC is the constitutional body that runs South African elections, registers parties and candidates, and certifies results. Its decisions on nomination validity are administrative, which is exactly why they can be challenged in court. The commission has not claimed that the ANC’s documents were false or that the candidates were ineligible. Its case, as reported, rests on the submission step not having been completed. The ANC’s case is that the system held the material and that a missed click by an administrator should not be treated as the party’s failure to nominate.

Both are arguments about the same record. Neither side has disputed that the candidates’ details and supporting documents were captured on the IEC’s system before the deadline. What is contested is whether capture equals submission.

Khanyi Magubane, an independent political analyst, discussed the case on SABC News after the party filed.

Readers should expect the court to weigh two competing interests. On one side is the right of a registered party to contest an election and the right of voters in those wards to find it on the ballot. On the other is the commission’s interest in a nomination deadline that applies to every party equally, and in an election timetable that has to be printed, audited and run on a fixed calendar.

That calendar is the reason the case is urgent. Ballot papers for a November local government election have to be finalised, printed and distributed to voting stations across all nine provinces. A court order that arrives after the papers are printed cannot be given effect without a reprint, and a reprint has to fit inside the same timetable. The Constitutional Court’s willingness to hear the matter quickly, and what it orders, will therefore matter as much as what it decides.

There is a second audience for this case. Every party that has ever had a nomination rejected, and every independent candidate who has missed a deadline, will read the outcome as the rule for next time. If the court holds that a system that captured the material but did not receive a final submission does not constitute a valid nomination, the deadline stays hard. If it holds otherwise, the commission’s submission process, and the way it is explained to parties, becomes the thing that has to change.

The IEC has run South African elections through load shedding, a pandemic and repeated legal challenges without a national poll being overturned, and its record on delivering a credible count is the reason its administrative rulings carry weight. That record is not in dispute here. What is in dispute is one step in one process, in one province’s worth of wards, five weeks out from a poll.

The Enquirer will report the outcome when the court rules.