One Missed Click May Cost ANC Candidates Their Ballot Spot

For ANC candidates and party members across several municipalities, the difference between appearing on the 2026 local government ballot and being shut out of it came down to a single click. Party officials uploaded their nomination documents onto the Electoral Commission’s Online Candidate Nomination System, but in respect of some municipalities nobody pressed “submit as final” before the 5pm deadline on 28 August 2026. That small omission now stands at the centre of a judgment that has reinforced some of the strictest rules in South African electoral law, and it has left those candidates facing exclusion from the ballot through no court’s choice but their own.

The Electoral Court heard four cases concerning candidate lists and the Electoral Commission of South Africa on 15 September 2026, and it moved with remarkable speed. Within minutes of hearing submissions in three of the matters, it delivered its orders. The fourth, heard after normal hours, produced an order the following morning, with written judgment following eight days later. Just as striking was the court’s ability to constitute four different panels of judges with experience in electoral law. Three of the cases concerned the same issue, the failure to submit candidate lists timeously, and the fact that different judges reached the same conclusion gave added weight to what the source describes as the “rigid” enforcement of the principle. In the intra-party dispute among those matters, where the commission was cited only as an interested party, the commission substituted the candidates as soon as the order was granted, matching the court’s pace with its own.

The principle at stake traces back to the Constitutional Court: “rigid adherence” to electoral laws, paradoxically, for the sake of fairness for all. Here that meant compliance with the requirements for nominating candidates through the commission’s prescribed Online Candidate Nomination System. The ANC contended that “glitches” in the system had prevented it from completing its submission. The commission demonstrated irrefutably that the system had functioned optimally, and that contention fell away. Once that happened, only the application of the law mattered.

The judgment applied first principles to the merits of the ANC appeal, and in doing so restated the ground rules that every party and every candidate must live by. Any act required in terms of the law must be performed by no later than 5pm on the date stated in the election timetable. Electoral deadlines serve the “important constitutional purposes of fairness, certainty and the orderly administration of elections”. A party that fails to comply with the timetable, or any other election regulation, is excluded from participating “by operation of law”. And neither the court nor the commission holds any general power or discretion to condone noncompliance. The commission’s case rested on these well-established principles, and the court predictably found in its favour, just as it did in five similar cases in the 2024 national and provincial elections, and just as the Constitutional Court did in ACT v IEC and two other matters, where it found the parties had only themselves to blame and refused leave to appeal.

Operation Dudula v IEC, heard the same day, was dismissed on exactly that footing: the party’s exclusion followed by operation of law, meaning the consequence took effect automatically. If certain facts exist, the rule applies irrespective of intention or any act. The familiar examples illustrate the logic. When tax falls due to SARS on the last day of a month and payment is not made, penalties become payable automatically. South Africans become eligible to register to vote the moment they turn 18. Likewise, noncompliance with the nomination system and the timetable automatically excludes a party. The value of governing by operation of law is certainty, predictability, fairness, efficiency, affordability and accessibility, and litigation is avoided. Clicking “submit as final” was precisely such a measure. The noncompliant parties knew the rules and had received extensive training, and the ANC itself had demonstrated this by timeously completing the bulk of its submissions.

Yet the judgment contains a wrinkle that should trouble careful readers. The court characterised the matter as raising a “novel and important question concerning the legal significance of the ‘submit as final’ function”. Whether that click is material to the system, or merely an inconsequential fancy gadget, is an intensely factual enquiry, and as a question of fact it was not appealable. So how did the case reach the court at all? The court may hear appeals against decisions of the commission, but only where such a decision relates to the interpretation of any law. The ANC alleged that the commission took such a decision, contending it was announced at a meeting of the National Political Liaison Committee on 1 September 2026 and confirmed at a media briefing the next day. But commission decisions are made at meetings of the commissioners and recorded in writing. Curiously, the court instead located the commission’s “decision” and “interpretation” in two emails: the ANC’s request of 2 September 2026 for an explanation of the technical and legal effect of the submit function, and the commission’s reply of 4 September, which explained that the final submission step communicates a party’s final and unequivocal decision to lodge the nomination and distinguishes complete submissions from provisional ones.

What the ANC had asked for was an explanation, not a decision, and an explanation is what it received. The contradictions between the ANC’s account and the court’s, about what the decision was and when it was made, cast doubt that favours the commission’s position: no discretion, no decision, no interpretation. On that view, the court should have found the noncompliant lists excluded by operation of law and refused leave to appeal, encouraging consistency and discouraging unmeritorious litigation.

Behind the doctrine stand the people the rules exist to serve. Political rights are constitutionally protected, and the tension between enfranchisement and disenfranchisement is ever present in electoral disputes. Rigid application of the law can seem hostile to transformative political rights, but precisely to enable enfranchisement, laws must be applied fairly and equitably, and that responsibility belongs not only to the commission and the courts but to the parties and candidates themselves. When disenfranchisement follows noncompliance, it is the noncompliant who must answer for it. The question that lingers is whether the candidates left off those ballots will accept that answer, or whether the next election cycle brings the same click, and the same loss, all over again.