DA files court papers opposing ANC’s Electoral Court appeal

The DA has asked the Electoral Court to block the ANC’s attempt to overturn the Electoral Commission of SA’s (IEC) decision to reject its candidate lists in six municipalities after the party failed to submit them by the deadline.

The DA is the second party after the ATM to file an application for leave to intervene in the ANC’s appeal.

The ANC is appealing against the IEC’s refusal to accept its lists, arguing that its candidates had already been captured on the commission’s online system before the deadline but that technical glitches prevented party administrators from clicking the final “submit” button.

The ANC wants the Electoral Court to recognise the lists as having been validly submitted, despite the final submission step not being completed.

The six municipalities at the centre of the dispute are:

• Port St Johns, Ngquza Hill, Walter Sisulu and Sundays River Valley in the Eastern Cape;
• uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal; and
• Mangaung in the Free State.

In Port St Johns and Ngquza Hill, the ANC failed to submit a single candidate. If its appeal fails, the party will not appear on the ballot in those municipalities.

The DA this week filed opposing papers asking the Electoral Court to grant it leave to intervene in the ANC’s appeal.

It argues that allowing the ANC to submit candidates after the deadline would prejudice parties that complied with the IEC’s rules and submitted their lists on time.

The DA says the ANC is effectively asking the court to change the rules of the election after the deadline had passed.

“The fairness of these elections would be fundamentally undermined if the ANC were allowed to nominate candidates who had not been submitted by the deadline in accordance with the commission’s prescribed requirements,” the DA argues in a founding affidavit by party member Werner Horn.

“The ANC’s basic complaint is this: it uploaded or ‘captured’ its candidate nominations by the deadline, but did not push the ‘submit as final’ button. As the information was available to the commission, the capturing without submitting should still be regarded as submission.”

But the DA argues that the ANC knew that capturing candidate information on the system was not the same as formally submitting it.

It points to the fact that the ANC completed the final submission process in all the other 251 municipalities where it submitted candidate lists.

According to the DA, the distinction between capturing and submitting was deliberately built into the IEC’s online candidate nomination system to allow parties to amend their lists before formally submitting them.

“If captured candidates were regarded as submitted as final, it would mean that parties who intentionally did not submit candidate lists would participate in elections they did not wish to participate in, or field candidates they did not wish to field,” the DA argues.

“Capturing is the same as preparing a draft for submission. Submitting as final is the act of handing the final documents to the commission. The ANC did the former, but not the latter.”

The DA argues that the ANC effectively accepts that it failed to submit its candidate lists in the six municipalities and says that should end the matter.

“There is no discretion to permit the ANC to field candidates where it did not submit them by the deadline,” it argues.

The party also accuses the ANC of being the “author of its own misfortune”, saying it left the submission of its candidate lists until the last minute.

Even if the ANC experienced technical problems, the DA argues, this does not justify allowing the party to submit its lists after the deadline.

The DA has also raised a procedural objection, arguing that the ANC has taken the wrong legal route by seeking leave to appeal when it has no automatic right to appeal.

“Finally, the ANC has followed the wrong procedural path. It has brought an application for leave to appeal where it has no right to an appeal. This court cannot properly consider the application before it,” the DA argues.

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