The ANC has approached the Constitutional Court to force the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) to include the 181 councillors on the 4 November ballot.
The party seeks to appeal last week’s Electoral Court decision, which ruled in favour of the IEC to bar the 181 councillors.
The ANC failed to submit 181 candidates for six municipalities before the IEC’s 5pm deadline on 28 August.
The party has maintained that the names were filed with the IEC but that it forgot to press the “submit” button.
It submitted 97% of its lists but maintains that the remaining 3% was submitted to the IEC but not captured because of technical glitches.
In its papers, which were filed on Wednesday in the Constitutional Court, party secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said that in respect of the six affected municipalities, the ANC’s administrators, for reasons beyond their control, could not press the button on the IEC’s Online Candidate Nomination System (OCNS) labelled “submit as final” before the cut-off time.
Mbalula said the IEC took the position that without pressing that button, the ANC had not submitted nominations in those municipalities. He said candidates whose complete particulars and supporting documents had been captured and were sitting in the IEC’s database were treated as though they had never been submitted.
“The Electoral Court upheld that position. The question is therefore whether pressing ‘submit as final’ is a condition of a valid electronic submission under sections 14 and 17 of the Act, or merely an administrative step within the Commission’s software that neither the Act nor the Regulations require. That is a question of law. It is the only question on which the appeal turns.”
He said the case was not a request for an extension of the submission deadline or for an individualised exemption, saying the ANC accepted the statutory cut-off time of 5pm on 28 August 2026 but sought recognition of what was in the IEC’s system at that moment, without addition, substitution, alteration or reordering afterwards.
“The nominations in the six affected municipalities were complete and all the deposits had been paid in full. The principle the ANC advances would apply, on the same terms, to every party and independent candidate in the same position as us. It is therefore not a plea for special treatment.
“It is not about whether the OCNS malfunctioned on the afternoon of 28 August 2026. That is disputed but the dispute is immaterial to the question of law. For the purposes of this appeal, the ANC accepts the Commission’s version of how its system functioned. If the ANC is right about the meaning of ‘submit’, it succeeds whatever the system did. If it is wrong, no evidence about the system can assist it.
“The question reaches well beyond the ANC. On the Commission’s own figures, 2 274 candidates from 45 political parties were captured on the OCNS but not ‘finally submitted’ by the cut-off at 17:00 on 28 August 2026.
“The Commission revealed that, of this figure, 480 are proportional representation candidates and 1 794 are ward candidates. The Commission described the ward nominations as having been ‘captured on time’.”
Mbalula said the IEC excluded the 2 274 candidates on the basis of the construction it adopted. He said voters in the affected municipalities and wards were consequently deprived of choices that Section 19 of the Constitution existed to protect.