DA moves to block ANC’s bid to salvage late municipal candidates in South Africa
The Democratic Alliance has moved to stop the African National Congress from getting late municipal candidates back onto the ballot, turning a filing dispute...
The Democratic Alliance has moved to stop the African National Congress from getting late municipal candidates back onto the ballot, turning a filing dispute into a test of whether South Africa’s election rules can be bent when a big party says its online submission went wrong. The case now sits before the Electoral Court, with the ANC fighting to overturn the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s decision to exclude candidates who missed the 28 August deadline.
Deadline dispute lands in court
The ANC says it submitted its candidate names “timeously and validly,” and has blamed the IEC’s online system for the missed filing. According to the party, 181 candidates in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Free State were affected by the technical problem.
The DA is having none of it. In papers filed before the court, the opposition party said no party should receive special treatment after missing a deadline that applied to everyone equally. “The rules are the rules and deadlines are deadlines,” the DA said.
The issue matters far beyond one party’s internal scramble. South Africa’s municipal elections depend on strict filing cut-offs, and the argument now centres on whether entering details into the IEC system is enough, or whether parties must also hit the final submission step before the clock runs out.
‘Submit as final’
In its court papers, the DA says capturing candidate information on the IEC platform is not the same as formally submitting a list. The system, it argues, requires parties to choose “submit as final” before a candidate list counts as lodged.
The DA said parties could keep uploading, changing and deleting names until they completed that final step. That distinction, it argues, is not a technicality. It is the point at which the deadline bites.
The party also said it filed its own candidates in all 257 municipalities on time, by 5 p.m. on 28 August. Courts, the DA added, have repeatedly insisted on rigid adherence to election deadlines because equal rules are essential to free and fair contests.
ANC vows to fight intervention
The ANC has signalled it will oppose the DA’s attempt to intervene. Party officials said the DA had no material stake in the matter and was only trying to score an electoral point.
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has said the party’s names were submitted properly, and that the dispute does not affect the DA’s own candidates. The ANC’s court challenge asks the Electoral Court to decide whether its lists were in fact filed before the deadline set under election rules.
The clash now leaves judges with a narrow but consequential question: whether a technical breakdown or a missed final click can excuse a late submission, or whether the same hard deadline that bound every other party must stand. The court’s next move will decide if six municipalities, and dozens of affected ANC hopefuls, stay in or stay out.
