181 candidates excluded from November election lists – ANC

The ANC says 181 of its candidates have been affected by a dispute with the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) over the submission of candidate nominations for the 4 November local government elections.

Briefing the media on Tuesday, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said the party had filed an application with the Electoral Court after the IEC refused to process candidate information, Hope Ntanzi reports for African News Agency.

The ANC claims the information had already been captured on the electoral body's electronic system before the 28 August deadline.

“On Friday the 4th September, the ANC filed an application in the electoral court. The matter is therefore before a court,” Mbalula said, adding that the party would not argue the merits of the case publicly.

Mbalula said the ANC had launched 9,128 candidates across the country's nine provinces, of whom 4,366 were registered for ward seats and 4,581 for proportional representation, bringing the total number of registered candidates to 8,947 – 97% of ward seats and 90% of proportional representation seats nationally.

The 181 affected candidates include 130 on proportional representation lists and 51 ward candidates across six councils. In Mangaung, uMsunduzi, Walter Sisulu and Sundays River Valley, the ANC's full slate of ward candidates remains on the ballot, with only the proportional representation lists in dispute. Both ward and proportional representation ballots are affected in the remaining two councils.

“That is a serious loss, and I will not minimise it, but it is not the loss that has been described,” Mbalula said.

He said the ANC was not alone in experiencing problems with electronic candidate submissions, citing IEC records showing that 2,274 candidates from 45 political parties were in the same position.

“Forty-five parties, 44 of them are not the ANC. Nine of every ten candidates caught by this ruling belong to somebody else,” he said.

According to Mbalula, 224 political parties submitted candidate nominations manually, while 299 used the electronic system, and no comparable problems had been reported with manual submissions.

“I draw no conclusion from that this morning. The court will,” he said.

Mbalula maintained that the candidate information in question was already on the IEC's system before the deadline, and that the ANC was not seeking to submit late candidates or extend the deadline.

“There is not a single name the ANC wishes to enter into the Commission's system anew. All the names are inside the system as we speak,” he said. “We asked to add no name. We asked to change no list. We asked for no late nomination and no late extension of any deadline.”

He said the Electoral Court must determine whether uploading candidate information onto the IEC's system before the deadline amounted to submitting the nomination.

“When a political party has completed the Commission's prescribed forms and uploaded its lists onto the Commission's own system before the hour, has that party submitted its lists? That is the question. The movement says it has. The Commission says it has not.”

Mbalula also addressed the Electoral Court's judgment in a separate case involving the UDF Party, which he said had been wrongly portrayed as a setback for the ANC's application. He said the UDF had sought relief relating to the candidate nomination deadline itself, whereas the ANC was not seeking an exemption or an extension.

“The ANC has no power to exempt one party from a deadline that binds all others. The ANC agrees with that,” he said. “We have never asked for an exemption. We have never asked for an extension. We are not asking for one now. What the UDF asked for and what the ANC asked for are different things. Friday's judgment is the clearest statement yet of that difference.”

Mbalula said the ANC was not seeking preferential treatment and wanted any relief granted by the court to apply to all 45 affected parties. “If the ANC succeeds, 2,093 candidates who are not ours succeed with us. That is the only kind of relief this movement will accept,” he said, adding that the party would abide by the Electoral Court's ruling.