JOHANNESBURG - The ANC says it is not seeking preferential treatment for its candidates and maintains that a technical glitch was responsible for its failure to meet the IEC’s deadline for submitting candidate lists.
The party briefed the media on Tuesday, a day after announcing that it had filed papers with the Electoral Court in Bloemfontein on Friday, 4 September, challenging the Independent Electoral Commission’s (IEC) candidate nomination deadline.
ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said the party’s candidate names had been submitted “timeously and validly”.
A total of 181 ANC candidates in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Free State have been affected by the technical issue.
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Mbalula said 2,274 candidates from 45 political parties, including the ANC, had also been affected by the glitch.
“There has been a great deal said about what the ANC did and did not do. From 13 July, on the instruction of my office, the movement’s candidates were loaded onto the commission’s system province by province,” he said.
He said the loading process continued for six weeks, while the ANC’s electoral committee compiled the lists, which were approved by the National Executive Committee on 25 August.
According to Mbalula, the lists were rectified on 27 August, a day before the IEC’s deadline.
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“The capturing that followed was done by the movement’s capturers, supervised by the provincial secretaries and the provincial list committees,” he said.
Mbalula said ANC operators were locked out of the commission’s system during the final hour on 28 August.
“The difficulty was reported to the commission’s responsible officials as it happened, and that record is before the court. The candidates’ information itself was on the commission’s system before 5pm,” he said.
“There is not a single name the ANC wishes to enter the commission’s system anew. All the names are in the system. Whether that constitutes submission in law is the question the courts will decide.
“We ask to change no list,” Mbalula added.