By Charmaine Ndlela
The uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party has demanded that the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) delay Sunday’s declaration of election results because of “system failures” and “discrepancies” in vote capturing in eThekwini, where it is leading the municipal race.
In a formal objection dated Friday, 6 November, the party called for “an immediate audit of the disputed results, the suspension of further processing of affected results pending verification, access for independent forensic analysis and the resolution of all outstanding discrepancies before the final declaration of the election results”.
“The IEC must delay the final announcement and gazetting of the municipal election results under Section 65 (of the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act) until every systemic discrepancy, quarantine ticket, and verification dispute raised in this document is fully resolved,” it said.
The party made similar allegations following the May 2024 national and provincial elections, demanding a recount and challenging the integrity of the IEC’s electronic results system.
That matter eventually reached the Electoral Court, which dismissed the challenge in September this year, finding that the party had failed to establish that the integrity of the results were compromised.
Friday’s objection was submitted by acting secretary-general Lindiwe Makubu and comes as counting and recounts continue in KwaZulu-Natal’s only metro.
READ| Ballot recounts delay election results declaration in eThekwini, Msunduzi
By 6am on Saturday, the MK Party was in third place nationally with 9.6% of the ward vote, or 1,367,659 votes, according to the IEC’s election results dashboard.
Nationally, 23,256 of the country’s 23,696 voting districts, or 98.1%, had been captured.
In eThekwini, the party was leading with 40% of the ward vote, followed by the DA on 24.1% and the ANC on 17.1%.
The MK Party had received 343,500 ward votes, with results captured from 714 of the municipality’s 839 voting districts, or about 85%.
Final results are scheduled to be announced at 5.30pm on Sunday.
Said Makubu in the letter to IEC commissioner Titi Pitso: “A critical system failure occurred during the live results capturing and data transmission phase at the IEC eThekwini Results Operations Centre (ROC). This breakdown disrupted data streams and altered the visible audit trails.”
“While results capturing remains active, severe arithmetic and physical mismatches have been identified. Monitored numbers captured electronically on the ROC leaderboards deviate systematically from the certified physical copies of the results slips (Form NP041) filled out and counter-signed by party agents at individual voting stations.”
The objection follows an IEC briefing in Durban on Friday at which KZN provincial electoral officer Ntombifuthi Masinga said that recounts in eThekwini and Msunduzi were delaying the finalisation of results.
“We, however, have eight municipalities where there were delays in the results capturing process for various reasons. One of them, eThekwini municipality, it is simply the volumes that affected them, but there has been quite a handful of recounts in eThekwini municipality,” she said.
Masinga said that recounts were required when the number of ballot papers issued did not correspond with the totals recorded for valid, invalid and spoiled ballots.
“So, if there is something that doesn’t add up, what we then do is, because those results slips are already in our capturing sites in our 44 municipalities that we have in the province, we then do a recount in the presence of the parties in those municipalities because party agents that would have been at voting stations are no longer available at the capturing site.”
The MK Party is also demanding that the commission allow an independent forensic systems analyst appointed by contesting political parties to examine its data-processing systems, source code operations and physical ballot reconciliations.
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It wants a technical explanation of the alleged network failure at the eThekwini results centre, including a verification log of data processed during the disruption.
The party further accused the IEC of making “misleading statements” about its deployment of party agents, alleging that these remarks had obscured problems with ballot handling and electoral oversight.
“The IEC’s public declarations falsely accusing the MKP of failing to field party agents across various stations served to mask localized system lapses and chain-of-custody breaks, directly obstructing our constitutional right to robust oversight,” the letter states.
Anticipating the possibility that its submission could be regarded as late, it also lodged an application for condonation, saying that the alleged irregularities were ongoing and could not have been fully documented before the deadline.
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