Opposition party's 2024 election challenge dismissed
Publish date: 28 September 2026
Issue Number: 1196
Diary: IBA Legalbrief Africa
Category: South Africa
The Electoral Court on Friday dismissed an application by former South African President Jacob Zuma's Mkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP) concerning the 2024 national and provincial elections. The party challenged the integrity and reliability of the Electoral Commission of SA's (IEC) digital votes capturing and reporting system, relying principally on the ‘leaderboard incident’ of 31 May 2024. This was when the public-facing results dashboard and leaderboard went blank for about two hours, reports TimesLIVE. The MKP, in its application, alleged that the IEC decided to deliberately interfere with a live and functioning digital vote-capturing and reporting system. It is alleged that the IEC acted unlawfully. This meant the 2024 elections were neither free nor fair. The party also claimed that the IEC used a digital vote-capturing and reporting system that was not reliable, and this caused serious doubts that it announced credible and accurate election results reflective of the will of the voters. In its judgment, the court held that the MKP failed to follow the mandatory procedure prescribed by section 55 of the Electoral Act.
The court held that the MKP failed to follow the mandatory procedure prescribed by section 55 of the Electoral Act. The court found that no competent review lay in relation to the declaration of results. It held that the party’s application to review the declaration of results was therefore not competent in law. On the merits, the court considered the leaderboard incident, during which the leaderboard and dashboard displayed zero results, according to TimesLIVE. The IEC explained that the entire election results system continued to run and remained fully operational and uncompromised, and that the only issue was that a system command or flag was inadvertently set to ‘not ready for display’ during the extract, transform and load optimisation process. The court accepted that the audit trail demonstrated that results continued to be captured and edited during this period and that no data was lost. The evidence further showed that the incident had no impact on the capturing and verification of the election results. Legalbrief Africa reports that the IEC welcomed Friday’s judgment, saying it will now finalise the independent and external audit of the results system to be used for the polls.
