MK Party asks Electoral Court to test IEC audit trails in 2024 election challenge

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