By Akani Nkuna
The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has rejected claims by EFF leader Julius Malema that votes cast for his party at Mponegele Primary School in Polokwane, Limpopo, were swapped with ANC votes during the 2024 national and provincial elections.
In a statement on Monday, the IEC said it was concerned about “sustained, yet inaccurate” claims about the management and integrity of the 2024 election results.
It said that such statements could undermine public confidence ahead of the 4 November local elections.
“Allegedly, [EFF] votes were attributed to the African National Congress (ANC). This is not correct. Results slips in the hands of the Commission indicate that the Mponegele Primary School vote count is the same as those captured on the Commission’s Results System,” the IEC said.
“The Commission wishes to indicate that South Africa’s result collation process is robust and predicated on transparency, extensive safeguards, and checks and balances which are designed to protect the integrity of the election results.”
The IEC said the safeguards included counting votes at voting stations in front of party agents and observers, compiling result slips at voting stations, having them countersigned by party agents, using a double-blind capture process, independent auditing of captured results against result slips, and giving political parties an opportunity to audit the results system.
The statement followed remarks by Malema during a podcast interview with JJ Tabane in Johannesburg on Friday, where he said he agreed with former president Jacob Zuma, now leader of the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, that the 2024 elections were “stolen”.
The MK Party disputed the 2024 election outcome after the polls and launched legal challenges, including an urgent Constitutional Court bid to stop the first sitting of Parliament, which was dismissed in June 2024. The IEC also opposed separate attempts by MK to set aside the results.
Malema said that, despite what he said was knowledge of voting discrepancies, he could not join Zuma in pursuing legal action to have the results set aside because proving the claim in court would be a different challenge.
“We cannot trust the IEC in the current form. No one can tell us who designed the IT system of the IEC. That is why I agree with Zuma, the elections were stolen. I could not join Zuma because it is not about what you know, but what you can prove,” Malema said.
The EFF leader said that after he and his wife queued for more than four hours to vote at Mponegele Primary School, the EFF had won comfortably at the voting station.
He alleged that then EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu later collected the result slip from the school and took it to an IEC capturing centre, where it allegedly showed that EFF votes had been swapped with ANC votes. Malema claimed the EFF had received the majority of votes at the station, but that the ANC was captured as the party with the most votes.
“[In] 2024 I was robbed to be president of this country… there are no party agents for the IT system, there are no party agents of the capturing, the party ends where you have voted. As to what happens until the results are shown on the big screen, there is no monitoring,” Malema said in the interview.
Malema also called for better digitalisation of the voting process, saying the system should allow political parties to monitor the process more fully from voting to the final display of results.
“As a 45 year old man, I might not be amenable to electronic voting, but the youth must not oppose that. The youth have to come with innovative methods on how we are going to monitor it,” he said.
The IEC said senior officials were already scheduled to meet EFF leaders on Thursday, at the party’s request. It said the meeting would be used to brief the party on election readiness and allow it to raise concerns about the electoral process.
