The Electoral Court has thrown out a legal challenge brought by the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party over the credibility of the 2024 national and provincial election results.
The party had questioned the integrity of the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s (IEC) electronic system used to capture and publish voting results.
At the centre of the dispute was an incident on May 31, 2024, when the IEC’s public results dashboard and leaderboard stopped displaying information for roughly two hours.
The MK Party argued that the IEC had unlawfully interfered with a digital system that was actively processing election results.
According to the party, the alleged interference undermined the integrity of the election and meant the polls could not be considered free and fair.
It also argued that the IEC’s digital vote-capturing and results-reporting infrastructure was unreliable.
The party said this raised substantial concerns about whether the final results were accurate, credible and an authentic reflection of voters’ choices.
The court, however, found that the MK Party had not complied with the procedure required under section 55 of the Electoral Act.
It ruled that the party had no competent legal basis to seek a review of the declaration of the election results in the manner it had done.
As a result, the court found that the application was legally incompetent.
The court nevertheless examined the evidence surrounding the May 31 leaderboard failure.
The IEC told the court that the underlying election-results system remained operational throughout the incident and was never compromised.
The commission attributed the outage to a system command or flag that was inadvertently changed to “not ready for display” while an extract, transform and load optimisation process was under way.
Evidence contained in the system’s audit trail showed that election results continued to be captured and amended while the public dashboard was unavailable.
The audit records also indicated that no election data was lost during the incident.
The court found that the temporary disappearance of the results from the public-facing platforms did not interfere with the actual capturing or verification of votes.
It further found that the incident had no effect on the integrity of the election results.
The court therefore dismissed the MK Party’s challenge, finding that its review application was not competent in law and that the evidence did not demonstrate that the leaderboard incident compromised the election results.