If the African Christian Democratic Party loses its eleventh hour bid to contest the city of Cape Town in next Wednesday’s election it will take out interdicts to prevent all other parties from contesting it too, the party’s lawyer told the Constitutional Court on Thursday.
Ismail Jamie SC said that if the ACDP was not allowed to contest Cape Town, thousands of voters would be disenfranchised.
”The right to vote for the party of your choice is gone.”
Ismail Jamie SC submitted that no parties adhered to the statutory registration requirements ahead of the local government elections, and nor did the Independent Electoral Commission itself.
The party, the third largest in the Cape Town municipality, was seeking leave to appeal an Electoral Court ruling that it be excluded from participating in the Cape Town poll because it accidentally left the city off its party list.
Jamie said that the IEC came to an agreement with the political parties that they make one bulk electoral deposit for the areas they wanted to contest, instead of the legal requirement that they attach a bank guaranteed cheque to their party lists.
”If you don’t want to hear this [appeal], our only option is to seek an interdict throughout the country where there has been non-compliance with this statutory decision and it will disrupt the elections.
”We followed the non-statutory course and now we want to challenge the unforeseen problem that arose from this non-statutory course,” Jamie said. ”Had the prescribed requirements been followed, this would not have happened.”
They also believed that it was up to the IEC to make sure the registration was correct. An IEC official had also made a mistake by ticking a box on the form saying that there was a cheque accompanying the registration.
He admitted that the party had erred in not putting Cape Town on its party nomination list, but said that they had complied ”substantially” and this should be enough.
”It was a simple mistake.”
But because they had withdrawn a number of wards at the registration deadline of February 19, the R10 000 surplus out of the R283 000 bulk deposit they had paid was enough to cover the R3 000 registration fee for their participation in Cape Town.
After a stern round of questioning by Justice Zak Yacoob IEC lawyer Jan Heunis said that the ACDP had submitted a nomination form which included Cape Town by the 5pm deadline on February 19, even though the city was not on the party list.
”I would suggest to you that at the precise second of 5pm the IEC owed [the ACDP] R7 000 … Cape Town had been paid for,” Yacoob said, making the court break a tense silence with laughter.
Both parties would file further affidavits on Friday morning relating to whether new ballot papers could be printed in time.
Jamie said that he had an undertaking from the printers in Epping that this was possible if they started on Saturday.
They also had an assurance from Eskom that power would not be disrupted in Epping during the printing, referring to the repeated power failures occurring in the Western Cape.
Judgement was reserved and the parties hoped to hear from the court before Saturday. – Sapa