ANC STATEMENT ON CANDIDATE REGISTRATION AND ELECTORAL COURT

The process of registering ANC candidates with the IEC experienced major challenges on Monday, 23 August 2021. We are assessing the impact of these challenges and the way forward.

We will be approaching the Electoral Court to re-open the process for at least one day for corrections and additions to be made. The challenges were caused by a combination of factors, many out of our control:

Covid Alert level 4 banned all meetings for most of July and this meant that more than 15 000 branch and community meetings had to be held from late July until 20 August to nominate and hold community meetings with ward candidates. This had a massive impact on the already tight deadlines we had to meet.

From mid-June the ANC repeatedly raised the impact of covid related restrictions on meetings (only 50 people indoors for June and August and no meetings for July) with the IEC, the Moseneke Inquiry, and eventually also with the Constitutional Court

We joined the IEC and other parties in the plea to the Constitutional Court to postpone elections so that parties and voters could exercise their democratic rights — key to our and the IEC's application was the time needed for candidate and voter registration. Unfortunately, judgement has been reserved and has not been able to postpone the candidate registration process.

As a result, our deadlines were very hard to meet. We faced numerous challenges: many candidates' IDs were rejected due to the absence of voter registration during the period; the IEC system repeatedly froze and locked our administrators out during the final few hours before the deadline; data already entered was voided and had to be re-entered.

The ultimate impact of this is that in around 35 municipalities voters will be prevented from voting for the ANC as a party, or in others for a ward candidate of their choice. This will have a massive impact on citizens, political parties and society generally. In certain instances this might result in a change of government regardless of how citizens might want to vote.

We want to assure our members, candidates and supporters that we are doing everything in our power to correct this. We also hope that the Constitutional Court and the IEC will take note of the massive impact that excluding the ANC in so many municipalities or wards will have on the voters dght to choose public representatives of their choice.

Statement issued by the African National Congress, 26 August 2021