ANC EXPLAINS DECISION TO APPROACH ELECTORAL COURT OVER CANDIDATE LIST DEBACLE WITH IEC
By Mpho Dube, Editor-in-Chief
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Johannesburg —The African National Congress today, September 08, 2026 moved to explain its decision to approach the Electoral Court after a debacle over its candidate lists for the November 4 local government elections, insisting that technical difficulties with the Electoral Commission of South Africa's online system prevented formal submission of some nominations.
The party claims the IEC system glitched. The Commission has denied that its system malfunctioned.
At a media briefing at its Luthuli House headquarters in Johannesburg, ANC Secretary General Fikile Mbalula said the party had successfully registered 9,128 candidates across all nine provinces to contest the upcoming polls on both ward and proportional representation ballots.
However, he confirmed that six councils and 181 nominations are affected by registration hiccups in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Mangaung Metro in the Free State. Those candidates had their details captured on the IEC's online nomination system but were not formally recognised as submitted by the August 28 deadline.
The IEC has maintained a firm line that candidates whose information was captured but not formally submitted by the deadline cannot be included on the ballot. The Commission previously disclosed that the problem was widespread, affecting 2,274 potential candidates from 45 political parties — comprising 480 proportional representation candidates and 1,794 ward candidates.
The ANC is now asking the Electoral Court to interpret what "submitted" means in law.
In its court papers, the party says its appeal concerns "only the interpretation of the word 'submitted'" as used in sections 14 and 17 of the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act. The party argues the matter is "purely a question of law" with no foreseeable disputes of fact.
The ANC's argument is that Section 14(1A) creates a single obligation to submit nominations but offers two alternative means of discharging it — by hand or electronically.
The party argues that the same legal requirement must apply to both, and that the verb "submit" cannot bear one meaning for manual nominations and a stricter meaning for electronic ones. "The verb governs both paragraphs; it is not repeated in either of them; and it cannot bear one meaning where the party takes route (a) and a stricter meaning where the party takes route (b)," the ANC states in its papers.
It further relies on the IEC's own wording that the cut-off "applied to both manual submission and online/electronic nominations" to argue that candidates whose details were already captured electronically before the deadline should be regarded as having been submitted.
Importantly, the ANC says it is not asking the court to reopen the nomination period. It is asking for a declaratory order that the affected party lists and ward nominations should be treated as having been lawfully and timeously submitted.
The briefing on Tuesday follows days of speculation after President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged there were glitches. "There were some glitches, glitches with regard to just the interface with the IEC system. The candidates' list was there for the whole country. They were submitted, and in regard to those areas there were some glitches," Ramaphosa said earlier.
Ramaphosa also noted the issue was not limited to the ANC, saying he was told 34 other parties were affected, and that a solution should be found so that technical problems do not prevent voters from choosing their preferred candidates.
He said the Electoral Court, as a specialist institution, should be able to resolve the dispute.
The ANC's court action comes after the Electoral Court last week dismissed a separate application by the United Democratic Front Party to extend the candidate nomination deadline. In that judgment, the court ruled that the IEC does not have the power to condone a missed statutory deadline — a precedent that could prove difficult for the ANC.
Opposition parties have already hit the campaign trail ahead of the November 4 municipal polls, with the Electoral Laws Amendment Bill also tabled in Parliament this week ahead of the elections.
Mbalula insisted the ANC remains ready to contest all municipalities and that the court challenge is necessary to protect the democratic rights of voters in the affected councils, where the absence of ANC candidates would distort representation.
The IEC is expected to oppose the application. The matter will be heard by the Electoral Court in the coming days.
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