IEC deadline to respond to MKP polls challenge

The Electoral Court has directed the IEC and other respondents to file answering affidavits to the MKP's application to set aside the recent elections by 6pm on Tuesday. The court on Friday also directed the MKP to file its replying affidavit by 27 June. The court reserved ‘the right to dispose of this matter on the papers without referral to oral hearing’, said the directions, according to a TimesLIVE report. The MKP has asked the Electoral Court to declare the recent national and provincial elections were not free and fair and were therefore invalid, and to set aside the results. It has asked the court to order the President to proclaim a new election date within 90 days of the court's order. In the application, the party's national organiser Nathi Nhleko said had the elections been free and fair, the MKP would ‘in all likelihood’ have won, ‘with the consequence it would have earned the right and obligation to form a national government’. Nhleko referred to the evidence of ‘experts’, which he said showed voting irregularities that were ‘glaring and inexplicable on any other basis other than that there was a huge attempt to subvert the democratic will of the citizens of this country’. The experts were not named in his affidavit, but he said the IEC could not explain the discrepancies in numbers produced in the expert tables attached to his affidavit. ‘It is clear these discrepancies are evidence of deliberate vote-rigging in that an IEC official was deliberately involved in changing the accurate votes captured at the voting district and replacing those results with false numbers,’ said Nhleko.