Simon Nare
The Electoral Court has dismissed the uMkhonto weSizwe Party’s challenge to the integrity and reliability of the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s digital vote-capturing and reporting system used in the 2024 national and provincial elections.
The MKP, which contested a national and provincial election for the first time in 2024, took the IEC to court after the public-facing results leaderboard stopped displaying results for about two hours on 31 May 2024 during what the commission said was a technical glitch.
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The incident affected the large screens at the National Results Operations Centre in Midrand as well as public-facing results platforms.
Following the declaration of the final results, and despite winning 14.58% of votes cast on the national ballot and securing 58 seats in the 400-member National Assembly, the MKP challenged the reliability and auditability of the IEC’s Information and Communications Technology systems.
The court, however, found that the party had failed to follow the mandatory procedure prescribed by Section 55 of the Electoral Act 73 of 1998 and that its application to review the declaration of the election results was therefore not competent in law.
The IEC had argued that despite the interruption to the public display, the underlying National and Provincial Elections Results System remained operational and uncompromised.
According to the commission, the problem arose when a system command or flag was inadvertently set to “not ready for display” during an Extract, Transform and Load optimisation process.
Said the court in its ruling: “This court accepted that the audit trail demonstrated that results continued to be captured and edited during this period and that no data was lost. The evidence further showed that the incident had no impact on the capturing and verification of the election results.
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“This court further found that, insofar as there was a factual dispute concerning the integrity and reliability of the digital votes capturing and reporting system, the Electoral Commission’s version, based on proven and undisputed facts, was to be preferred over MKP’s version, which was based on inferences. It concluded that it had not been demonstrated that the NPE Results System lacked integrity.”
The latest ruling follows a lengthy legal battle between the MKP and the IEC over the 2024 elections.
The party initially launched a challenge to the election results but later withdrew that case in July 2024. The Electoral Court subsequently ordered the party to pay costs.
