ANC Takes Candidate-List Fight To Constitutional Court After Electoral Court Loss
The ANC has taken its fight over 181 excluded candidates to the Constitutional Court, seeking to overturn an Electoral Court ruling that kept the candidates off the 4 November local government election ballot.
The dispute centres on candidate information that was captured on the IEC’s Online Candidate Nomination System before the 28 August 5pm deadline, but was not finally submitted using the system’s “submit as final” function.
The ANC argues that the candidate information, supporting documents and required payments were already submitted to the IEC before the deadline and should be recognised as valid nominations.
The IEC maintains that capturing information on the system does not amount to a completed nomination and says the final-submission process formed part of the prescribed electronic nomination procedure.
The 181 affected ANC candidates comprise 130 proportional-representation candidates and 51 ward candidates across six municipalities: Sundays River Valley, Walter Sisulu, Ngquza Hill and Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape; uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal; and Mangaung in the Free State.
The ANC has attributed the failure to finalise the submissions to problems with the IEC’s electronic system, while the commission has disputed that account.
The Electoral Court dismissed the ANC’s case on 16 September and granted the DA leave to intervene.
The dispute could also have wider implications. The IEC says 2,274 candidate nominations from 45 political parties were captured on its online system but were not finally submitted before the deadline. The figures include 1,794 ward candidates and 480 PR candidates.
The IEC has since certified 136,790 candidates to contest the 2026 local government elections.
