The country's courts are facing a barrage of election-related litigation weeks before voters head to the polls on November 4.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has approached the Electoral Court over single-name proportional-representation (PR) candidate lists submitted by ActionSA, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party and GOOD ahead of the November 4 local government elections.
The DA alleges that the parties are attempting to bypass candidate-nomination requirements and prevent voters from scrutinising potential councillors before voting.
At the centre of the application are PR candidate lists containing only one name per municipality. The DA argues that this undermines voters’ right to know who may represent them before they cast their ballots.
The parties submitted names for ward councillor candidates but submitted single-name PR lists in the municipalities they are contesting. This means voters will not know in advance who will represent a party if it wins additional proportional-representation seats; those names would become public only after the election results are declared.
DA federal council chairperson Ashor Sarupen said courts had consistently held that voters’ right to information before an election was protected.
“Parties are required to present voters with the names of their candidates before voters go into a voting booth to choose their political parties, not after the votes have been counted,” he said.
ActionSA national chairperson Michael Beaumont defended the party’s position, referring to the Municipal Electoral Act. He said the Act allows a party to supplement its PR list and does not limit how a party selects candidates to add to the list.
Beaumont said the DA had relied on this provision to supplement its PR lists in previous elections and had used it for the upcoming elections. He said the DA had submitted one-seat lists in several KwaZulu-Natal municipalities.
The EFF, MK Party, GOOD and the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) have not yet publicly responded to the case.
ABC challenges alleged duplicate candidates
In a separate matter, The National has reported that the Abantu Batho Congress (ABC) has claimed in papers before the Electoral Court in Bloemfontein that 11 of its councillors appear on the candidate lists of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the MK Party.
The IEC, the councillors and the implicated parties except the MK Party had not yet responded to the matter. The MK Party had claimed that the matter had been settled however the ABC disputed this.
ANC challenges excluded candidates
Meanwhile, the African National Congress (ANC) has approached the Constitutional Court in an urgent application seeking to overturn the Electoral Court’s dismissal of its case. The ANC filed its application this week.
The ANC wants the IEC to reinstate 181 councillor candidates who were excluded across six municipalities after the party missed statutory submission deadlines. The party said a technical glitch in the IEC’s system prevented the submission of some councillor candidate lists for the November local government elections before the 5pm deadline on August 28. The party said the names were captured, but not submitted.