What the IEC says happened
The dispute over the ANC candidate lists for the 4 November local government elections is before the Electoral Court, and the numbers at the centre of it are larger than the party at the centre of it.
The Electoral Commission of South Africa says 2,274 prospective candidates from 45 political parties were captured on its Online Candidate Nomination System but not finally submitted before nominations closed at 17:00 on Friday, 28 August 2026. Of those, 1,794 were ward nominations and 480 were proportional representation candidates.
The commission received 142,072 nominations in total, contesting 10,526 council seats, from 504 political parties. Of those parties, 299 submitted through the online system and 205 submitted manually at IEC offices. Nominations were up 43% on the 2021 elections.
The 2,274 unsubmitted candidates therefore represent about 1.6% of all nominations received, a Southafriworld calculation from the commission’s two published figures.
ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula told a briefing at Luthuli House on Tuesday, 8 September, that 181 of those candidates are the ANC’s, made up of 130 on PR lists and 51 ward candidates, across six of the country’s 257 municipalities. The party met the deadline in the other 251.
The IEC has rejected the ANC’s account that its system malfunctioned. Chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo has said no system glitch was reported and that being captured on the system is not the same as being formally submitted. IEC chairperson Mosotho Moepya rejected the party’s version at a briefing on 3 September. The commission has said the affected candidates are not in contention, and that the nomination system had been open to parties since 21 June 2026.
What the ANC candidate lists case actually turns on
The ANC filed an application in the Electoral Court on Friday, 4 September. It is not asking for an extension or an exemption, and that distinction is the whole of its case.
The party says it completed the prescribed forms and uploaded all supporting documents for the six municipalities before the deadline, but that technical problems prevented its administrators from completing the final electronic step. According to its papers, administrators were logged out at 16:34, reported the problem to an IEC official at 16:35, and were logged out again at 16:57.
“There is not a single name the ANC wishes to enter into the commission’s system anew,” Mbalula said. “All the names are inside the system as we speak.”
The legal question is the meaning of the word “submitted” in sections 14 and 17 of the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act. The ANC argues the Act provides for electronic submission, that uploading the required information and documents before the deadline amounted to submission, and that the distinction between information being captured and being submitted as final is a feature of the IEC’s software rather than a requirement created by legislation.
It also relies on the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, which it says treats the delivery of electronic data to a designated information system as the equivalent of handing documents to an official.
The Democratic Alliance has filed for leave to intervene and wants the application dismissed. “Capturing candidates on the IEC system is not the same as submitting them,” said DA Federal Council Chairperson Ashor Sarupen, who noted that the system expressly requires parties to submit as final, and that the DA submitted candidates in all 257 municipalities on time.
A recent ruling cuts against the ANC in appearance if not in substance. The Electoral Court dismissed an application by the United Democratic Front Party on 7 September, which had sought to submit ward candidates after the deadline. Mbalula argued the cases differ, because the ANC is not asking to submit anything late.
Where the ANC stands to lose seats
| Municipality | Province | In dispute | ANC seats won in 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ingquza Hill | Eastern Cape | Ward and PR candidates | 46 of 64 |
| Port St Johns | Eastern Cape | Ward and PR candidates | 31 of 39 |
| Mangaung | Free State | PR list only | 51 of 101 |
| uMshwathi | KwaZulu-Natal | PR list only | 16 of 27 |
| Walter Sisulu | Eastern Cape | PR list only | 12 of 22 |
| Sundays River Valley | Eastern Cape | PR list only | 10 of 16 |
Ingquza Hill and Port St Johns are the severe cases. If the application fails, the ANC would have no candidates on either ballot in two municipalities it won by wide margins five years ago, including all 20 ward seats in Port St Johns.
The PR omissions include senior figures. ANC veteran Frank Chikane was on the Johannesburg list, Deputy Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture Nocawe Mafu on the Buffalo City list, and former ANC Youth League deputy president Andile Lungisa on the Nelson Mandela Bay list.
Mbalula said the party registered 8,947 candidates nationally, 4,366 ward and 4,581 PR, and put its national registration rate at 97% of ward candidates and 90% of PR candidates. Those percentages do not reconcile straightforwardly with the candidate counts given at the same briefing, and the ANC has not published the denominators used.
The 44 parties nobody is talking about
The case is being fought as the ANC against the IEC, with the DA intervening. The candidates whose fate it concerns mostly belong to neither.
If 2,274 candidates were caught and 181 are the ANC’s, then 2,093 belong to the other 44 parties. That is about 92% of the affected candidates, and Mbalula made the point directly. “Nine of every ten candidates caught by this ruling belong to somebody else,” he said, adding that the ANC wants any relief to apply equally to the other affected parties.
The DA’s statement addresses the ANC’s position and the principle of equal deadlines. It does not address the other 44 parties or what a dismissal would mean for their 2,093 candidates. None of those parties has been reported as having filed its own application.
How far a ruling in the ANC’s favour would extend to parties that are not before the court is not settled, and the ANC’s assertion that they would succeed with it is a claim about the effect of a judgment rather than a decided point.
What happens next
The ANC is also dealing with the failure internally. NEC member Mondli Gungubele described the incident on social media as a scandalous failure of leadership that cannot be joked about.
Mbalula rejected the idea that one person should carry it, saying the process ran through nine stages, eight of them collective structures including the National Executive Committee, and that he approved the lists for lodgement in front of witnesses. He said an internal report identified 252 incorrect identity numbers in the party’s records and found that its own Electoral Committee had raised the problem as early as June. He said accountability would follow the party’s internal structures rather than a news cycle, and invited anyone holding evidence of deliberate wrongdoing to bring it forward.
ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu has maintained that the party’s upload was complete before 17:00 on 28 August and that it did not miss the deadline.
The party says it is changing its process, bringing its internal deadline forward by seven days, verifying identity numbers against the National Population Register and increasing the number of accredited users on the IEC system. Its Eastern Cape list is under forensic review.
The time available is short. The IEC must publish a final candidate list before the election, and one published account places that date at 16 September 2026, which Southafriworld could not confirm against an IEC notice. No hearing date for the ANC’s application has been announced, and the Electoral Court has not indicated when it will rule.
