BOHLATSE MOKGOLA | If the data exists in IEC system, then what should constitute submitted?

South Africa should be asking a simple question in the dispute between the ANC and the Electoral Commission (IEC) : if candidate information was already captured on the IEC’s system, should a party lose its right to contest an election because it was later unable to access or complete the process on that same system?

This is not a question about giving the ANC special treatment. It is a question about whether an election outcome should turn on a technical barrier, when the underlying information may already exist inside the electoral system itself.

In a notice of application filed on September 4, the ANC asked the electoral court to declare that its party lists and ward nominations for six municipalities, Sundays River Valley, Walter Sisulu, Ngquza Hill, Port St Johns, uMshwathi and Mangaung, were timeously, lawfully and validly submitted ahead of the November 4 local government elections. The IEC’s position is that the deadline, set at 5pm, was missed and that the system operated correctly throughout.

The ANC’s argument is narrower than the “missed deadline” framing suggests: that the required information was uploaded before the cut-off, and that the dispute concerns whether that constituted a valid submission despite the final electronic step not being completed.

This is not a new legal question, and the ANC is not the first to raise it.

This is where the case becomes bigger than any one party. In 2024, the Constitutional Court considered near-identical arguments from the African Congress for Transformation, the Labour Party of South Africa and others, who claimed the IEC’s Online Candidate Nomination System malfunctioned and prevented them from submitting complete lists before the deadline.

It would be easy to read this as one more ANC legal fight. That would miss the point. Three separate cases in under two years, the 2024 Constitutional Court matters, the UDF’s application this September, and now the ANC’s, show this is not a one-off dispute but a recurring feature of digital nomination processes.

The court dismissed those applications, but on a specific factual basis: it found the parties’ own poor time management and inefficient submission methods were to blame, not a system failure.

Crucially, the court did not rule out the opposite finding. Its reasoning left room for a party to succeed where it can show the failure was genuinely the system’s, not its own.

That exception is precisely what a more recent electoral court judgment, dismissing a similar bid by the newly registered UDF Party on September 7, made explicit: the IEC has no statutory power to condone a missed deadline, except where a party can persuade the court that its submission was technically complete in time and that the dispute concerns a malfunction in the IEC’s own system rather than a request to extend a deadline. That is the exact carve-out the ANC’s case now tests.

The obvious objection is that this reasoning invites every party that misses a deadline to claim, after the fact, that a system glitch is to blame.