At 10h00 on Thursday the Constitutional Court will decide whether an unclicked button on the Electoral Commission's online system can permanently remove 181 ANC candidates from the 4 November local government election ballot.
The apex court judgment in case CCT 282-26 follows an urgent hearing earlier this week. The legal battle centres on whether uploading candidate credentials and paying statutory nomination deposits before the 28 August deadline constitutes valid submission under the law, or whether clicking an additional final confirmation button is mandatory.
The Electoral Court previously upheld the exclusion on 16 September. That bench ruled that the final electronic click constitutes the mandatory statutory act of candidate nomination. The ANC appealed to the Constitutional Court on the grounds that disqualifying fully captured candidates over a technical portal requirement effectively disenfranchises voters in affected communities.
The exclusion affects six municipal councils across three provinces. The councils include Sundays River Valley, Walter Sisulu, Ingquza Hill, and Port St Johns in the Eastern Cape, uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal, and the Mangaung metropolitan municipality in the Free State.
In Port St Johns and Ingquza Hill, the failure left the governing party without a single candidate on either the ward or proportional representation ballots. If the apex court upholds the exclusion, opposition parties and independent candidates will capture those municipal councils without facing an ANC challenger at the polls.
The legal challenge also touches on equal administrative treatment across the political spectrum. Commission records show that 2,274 candidates from various political parties were captured on the portal before the 17h00 cut-off but never final-submitted. The court ruling will determine whether the commission must reopen candidate lists broadly or enforce the strict electronic deadline across all contenders.
With the local government elections scheduled for 4 November, the judgment arrives under extreme logistical pressure. The IEC must finalize candidate lists immediately so state printers can produce tens of millions of ballot papers and distribute them to voting stations nationwide.
Candidate nomination under the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act 27 of 2000 requires registered political parties to submit candidate lists and pay prescribed election deposits before a published statutory deadline.
The Municipal Electoral Act does not explicitly mandate a multi-stage digital portal workflow with a separate final submission click. Instead, the statute empowers the commission to prescribe the operational manner and format of submissions.
The legal dispute before the Constitutional Court balances strict administrative compliance against Section 19 political rights enshrined in the Constitution. The central constitutional question asks whether an administrative portal procedure can nullify valid voter choices when party administrators complied with all substantive statutory requirements including vetting and deposit payments.
For voters in Port St Johns, Ingquza Hill, Sundays River Valley, Walter Sisulu, uMshwathi, and Mangaung, this morning's judgment dictates the exact choices that will appear on your ballot paper on 4 November.
If the apex court dismisses the ANC application, voters in Port St Johns and Ingquza Hill will see no ANC candidates on the ballot. That outcome hands governance of those councils directly to opposition parties or local independents.
If the court orders the IEC to reinstate the excluded lists, the commission must immediately reprint or amend ballot proofs across the six municipalities. This intervention would restore multi-party competition in contested wards.
For the wider electorate, the judgment establishes a permanent precedent for how state digital portals regulate constitutional rights. The decision defines whether technical software steps take precedence over substantive legal compliance during democratic elections.
* Does the Municipal Electoral Act permit the IEC to invalidate nominations based on an electronic confirmation step that is not explicitly named in primary legislation?
* If the Constitutional Court orders relief for the ANC, will the IEC apply the exact same remedy to the 2,274 other candidates across multiple parties who faced identical portal lockouts?
* Can the commission reprint and distribute amended ballot papers across the six affected municipalities without delaying the 4 November election timetable?