THE Constitutional Court is expected to rule on the applications of three political parties that want to appeal against the judgment of the electoral court that excluded them from participating in the elections.
These are the African Congress for Transformation (ACT), the Labour Party of South Africa (Labour Party) and the African Alliance of Social Democrats (AASD).
The parties failed to submit their lists on time, which means they don't comply with Section 27 of the Electoral Act and are therefore excluded from participating in the elections on 29 May.
However, in their court documents, they state that the reason for not meeting the deadline was that the Online Candidate Nomination System (OCNS) allegedly didn't work properly, making it impossible to submit their complete lists.
ACT seeks a review and cancellation of the Electoral Commission of South Africa's (IEC) decision to refuse the submission of its full list, including the IEC’s decision not to extend the deadline to enable it to submit its full list.
She also calls for the reopening of the OCNS for a reasonable period of time to enable her to submit her full list.
The Labour Party seeks a declaration that its disqualification from participating in the elections on the grounds that it failed to meet the deadline is incompatible with the Constitution and unlawful.
All the applicants had asked the IEC to extend the deadline for the submission of their lists.
The IEC rejected the requests on the grounds that it had no discretion to condone non-compliance with the election timetable or to make ad hoc exceptions to the election timetable to enable them to submit their lists.
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They appealed to the Electoral Court to challenge the IEC’s decision, but the court ruled in favour of the IEC in a judgment on 15 April.
The Election Court found that evidence showed that the OCNS functioned without problems at the relevant times. 87 political parties and 24 independent candidates were able to use the OCNS without difficulty and met the deadline, some even at the very last minute.
It found that the claimants were responsible for failure to meet the deadline.
The Election Commission accepted the IEC’s submission that free and fair elections require adherence to deadlines set out in the election calendar and that changing the election calendar to accommodate a party's failure to meet deadlines would be inherently unfair to other parties and candidates who met the deadlines.
The IEC submits before the Apex Court that the OCNS didn't fail and that the reason the candidates couldn't meet the deadline was because they managed their time inefficiently and adopted inefficient methods of filing.
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