There was no glitch.
That is what SA’s Electoral Commission (IEC) has told the Electoral Court, saying its records show ANC officials were still using the candidate nomination system right up until the deadline for submitting candidate lists for the November 4 local government elections.
The IEC filed its answering affidavit on Wednesday, opposing the ANC’s application to have candidates it failed to submit in time placed on the ballot in six municipalities.
The ANC failed to get the lists submitted before the 5pm deadline on August 28 and has instead blamed technical problems with the commission’s online candidate nomination system.
Its list troubles spread further on Thursday when it admitted that capturing errors had also affected eThekwini and Ray Nkonyeni in KwaZulu-Natal, with ward candidates entered under the wrong wards, duplicated and swapped between wards.
Chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo deposed to the affidavit, seen by IOL, and said the ANC’s own activity on the system showed it had access to the nomination platform but left the final submissions too late to meet the deadline.
“The ineluctable inference to be drawn from this objective evidence is that the ANC simply ran out of time,” the responding affidavit read.
“By leaving the final submission step to the last moment for a number of municipalities, it could not complete the process.
“The effect is that it did not nominate candidates for those municipalities.”
The ANC said its administrators were logged out of the system at 4.34pm and again at 4.57pm on the day of the deadline.
Mamabolo attached a table drawn from the commission’s data showing that none of the six municipalities had any recorded system activity at or near either of those times.
He also attached automated emails showing that the ANC submitted its ward and proportional representation lists for another municipality, Inxuba Yethemba, as final at 4.56pm and 4.57pm.
Inxuba Yethemba is a local municipality in the Eastern Cape’s Chris Hani District, covering Nxuba, formerly Cradock, Middelburg and surrounding communities
The commission’s servers recorded no downtime at all in that period, he said, and the ANC had put up nothing to prove otherwise.
“The ANC, whilst fully aware of the dispute of fact on this aspect, has elected not to adduce any evidence whatsoever to either support its assertions about a system glitch, which is denied, or to gainsay these objective facts,” Mamabolo said.
The commission said it had warned the party several times before the deadline.
It held training in June and further sessions in all nine provinces in July, attended by ANC representatives.
Officials also made it clear in red text on four slides of the presentation that the lists had to be submitted as final.
Two days before the deadline, the system sent the ANC an automated email listing every ward list it had not yet submitted as final. The email was 92 pages long.
IEC says ANC ran out of time
Mamabolo said the party had still been changing lists in the final hours, withdrawing an already submitted list for Chief Albert Luthuli in Mpumalanga at 3.44pm on the day of the deadline.
“Quite plainly, one cannot leave matters to the last moment to ensure all candidate lists have been finally submitted,” he said.
“Even with physical submission of candidate nominations, an option that remained open to the ANC, should a party leave it to the last hour, it may have car issues or get stuck in traffic and not make the deadline.
“The party must shoulder the responsibility for doing so.”
The commission’s central legal argument was that there was nothing for the ANC to appeal against.
“The commission did not take a decision to exclude the ANC’s lists from the six municipalities in question,” Mamabolo said.
“The ANC did not submit those lists by the deadline using the OCNS.
“By operation of law, those candidates were not nominated. There is no decision to appeal against.”
The municipalities in dispute included Sundays River Valley, Walter Sisulu, Ngquza Hill and Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape, uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal and Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality in the Free State.
Ngquza Hill and Port St Johns are the worst hit.
Both are ANC strongholds, and in each the party stands to have no candidate on either ballot when voters go to the polls on November 4.
The commission’s records showed the ANC last touched its lists for those two municipalities at 10.10pm the night before the deadline, with no activity at all in the final two hours.
Parties spend months loading candidates onto the system, uploading names, ID copies and signed acceptance of nomination forms. Nothing is treated as delivered to the commission until the party clicks “submit as final”.
Nationally, 142,072 candidates were nominated.
A further 2,274 candidates from 45 parties were captured on the system but never finally submitted, and the commission said they were not in contention.
The ANC also said it was opposing the DA’s application to intervene in the case, which was filed on Wednesday.
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said in a statement that the fight was between the ANC and the commission, and that the commission needed no help defending itself.
“The DA has no quarrel with the commission and no quarrel with the law,” Mbalula said.
He said the DA’s only interest was electoral, that it contested the same six municipalities including Mangaung, and that it would rather face fewer opponents on the ballot.
The DA’s founding affidavit was deposed to by MP Werner Horn, who sits on the IEC’s national political liaison committee.
“On its own version, the ANC did not submit candidates in the six municipalities,” Horn said.
“That is the beginning and end of the case. There is no discretion to permit the ANC to field candidates where it did not submit them by the deadline.”
The commission publishes the final candidate list next week.
IOL
