Simon Nare
The uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party) asked the Electoral Court on Wednesday to refer disputed technical issues around the IEC’s audit trails and results management reports to oral evidence, arguing that the commission’s explanation for the 2024 results dashboard outage should be independently tested.
The party is challenging the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s (IEC) declaration of the 2024 national and provincial election results, alleging that vote-rigging and manipulation may have occurred while the public-facing results dashboard and leaderboards were offline during the counting process.
The IEC has denied that the results were compromised. At the time, the commission said the outage was caused by an interruption in the replication of data between its national data centre and Results Operation Centres, and that the data remained intact while results processing continued unaffected.
Advocate Thabani Masuku, acting for the MK Party, argued that there had been no urgency for the IEC to act on the live results feed because results were still coming in during that period.
He submitted that the IEC’s audit trails and results management reports should be referred to oral evidence so they could be interrogated by an independent expert to determine whether they answered the questions raised by the party.
Masuku said the party had appointed a highly qualified information technology expert, who held a PhD, and who disputed the IEC’s version of events.
“What we are saying is that you should not accept what the IEC is saying on the face of it that this is what happened.
“We say that the system is not peripheral, it is at the heart of the process,” he said.
Masuku argued that it was common cause that the IEC had acted on the live system, but said the dispute was whether this amounted to a properly managed intervention or interference with the results-reporting process.
“So, the dispute that we want to be referred to oral evidence is whether it can prove that there was interference and not intervention because intervention presupposes that it was a carefully planned process which met all the safeguards that are required in order to ensure that the system functions optimally. We know it didn’t,” he said.
Masuku questioned what had prompted the IEC’s intervention, whether complaints had been received from all nine provinces, and whether those complaints were of the same nature.
He also questioned whether all provinces had complained that the system was too slow or required an urgent upgrade while results were still being processed.
“All the nine provinces were sending complaints, we will need to probe that to get some understanding. So, we use interference because that is how we interpret the decision of the IEC to interfere with a live system.
“We know that the system stopped reporting results and the intervention was prompted by a system’s failure, right. So what we know is that there was malfunctioning of the system,” he argued.
Masuku further argued that MK Party was not asking the court to accept the IEC’s explanation at face value, but to allow the disputed technical issues to be tested through oral evidence.
Judgment was reserved.
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