ANC’s rush before IEC list deadline

At 3.04pm, with fewer than two hours before the election deadline, an ANC administrator was active on the Mangaung candidate records. At 3.29pm, another ANC list was submitted as final. Fifteen minutes later, the party reopened it.

This minute-by-minute picture of the ANC’s final nomination push emerges from Electoral Commission records filed in the Electoral Court by chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo.

The IEC’s workflow audit identifies activity by the ANC’s authorised administrators, Shanaaz Lamara and Rachmat Lamera, as the 5pm deadline approached on August 28.

It does not identify every click. But system records show the party withdrawing one completed list and successfully finalising two Inxuba Yethemba submissions during the minutes in which it says technical failures disrupted its work.

At 3.29.57pm, the ANC submitted its Chief Albert Luthuli ward list as final.

At 3.44.47pm, Lamara withdrew it, returning 25 ward nominations to a status in which they could be changed.

The notice warned that the list was “no longer available for the planned election unless it is resubmitted and finalised” before 5pm.

The audit records further activity on Chief Albert Luthuli at 3.46pm, 3.47pm, and 3.51pm.

For the six municipalities before court, the records show activity on uMshwathi at 4pm, Sundays River Valley at 4.52pm, and Walter Sisulu at 4.55pm. Mangaung’s last recorded activity was at 3.04pm. There was no activity on Ngquza Hill or Port St. John’s during the final two hours. Their last recorded activity was about 10.10pm the previous evening.

The ANC says the missing final submissions resulted from failures in the IEC’s Online Candidate Nomination System (OCNS). “At 16h34, the ANC’s administrators were logged out of the OCNS and returned to its landing page,” the party says, adding that officials tried to report the problem at 4.35pm and received a return call at 4.40pm. “At 16h57, they were again logged out of the OCNS and returned to the landing page.”

The ANC maintains that the affected information had been captured and uploaded before the deadline. The malfunction allegedly prevented only the final confirmation. “The ANC does not ask to add candidates whose information was not on the OCNS by 17h00,” it says. “It does not seek to amend, supplement, or reorder any list after the deadline.”

Mamabolo rejects that account.

During the alleged disruption, IEC records show the ANC submitting its Inxuba Yethemba ward nominations at 4.56.39pm. Lamara submitted nine verified candidates.

At 4.57.34pm, Lamera submitted the municipality’s proportional representation list containing seven verified candidates.

“This objective evidence shows that the ANC was able to access the OCNS and submit as final its list,” Mamabolo says.

The IEC says none of the six municipalities recorded activity at or close to the logout times supplied by the ANC. Its servers recorded 100% availability and no downtime.

“The OCNS was functional at all relevant times,” Mamabolo says.

“The ineluctable inference to be drawn from this objective evidence is that the ANC simply ran out of time,” Mamabolo says. “By leaving the final submission step to the last moment for a number of municipalities, it could not complete the process.”

The ANC counters that electoral regulations require completed electronic forms and uploaded annexures but do not expressly prescribe an additional final button.

The IEC says information remained provisional and editable until that button communicated the party’s final decision. “Without the final submission step being performed, there is no electronic submission of a nomination,” Mamabolo says.

Setumo Stone