The Labour Party of South Africa (Labour Party) has welcomed the directive from the Constitutional Court that its urgent application, focussing on the malfunctioning of the online portal of the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), will be heard on May 8 and that respondents must file answering affidavits by April 30.

Labour Party secretary Krister Janse van Rensburg explained that the IEC’s online portal malfunctioned before the March 8, 17h00 deadline, resulting in many new parties being unable to upload the supporting documents required by the amended Electoral Act, which now requires new parties to upload up to 62 000 names, surnames, ID numbers and signatures of registered voters in order to contest the election.

He said the party has consistently put forward that the system was untested for the new requirements, and that it was therefore not “fit for purpose”.

Now the Labour Party wants the Constitutional Court to find its exclusion from the elections “inconsistent with the Constitution and unlawful” and for the President to postpone the elections.

On 9 March 2024, the IEC issued a statement indicating that at least 101 unrepresented parties made submissions via the online portal.

Van Rensburg highlighted that of these, only 38 were successful in ensuring that they contest the elections.

“According to our calculations based on articles and statistics appearing on the IEC’s website, this means that a shocking total of 63 parties were unsuccessful. It is fair to say that they had sufficient support to start with their online submissions, but they were unable to do so via the online portal, by the IEC’s deadline. This calculates to a failure rate of almost 63%,” he said.

Van Rensburg argued that because a minority of parties did manage to finish uploading the documents, that does not mean that the systems were working for everybody, or that it was the fault of the parties that failed to have their documents uploaded.

“It is a commonly accepted principle of democracy that regulators put in place by the State should not make it unnecessarily difficult for parties to participate and voters to vote,” he added.

He noted that the party welcomed that its urgent application had been set down by the Court, saying that it was ironic that this still meant that a dispute which arose on March 8 would only be fully ventilated exactly two months later.

He highlighted that the court directives also, once again, as in the case at the Electoral Court, combined the applications of other political parties with that of the Labour Party, even though there were some key differences between these applications, both in terms of content and in terms of approach.

“While we do believe that it may very well be a limitation when our case with its unique features is combined with that of other parties, it is also true that there is a golden thread of simplicity in the fact that all of us experienced similar problems with the IEC’s malfunctioning portal,” he said.

He said the party was confident that it had a strong case, and its prospects were firmly grounded on two points

“Firstly, it is about the clear prejudice faced by new parties being forced to use an untested and malfunctioning online portal and, perhaps even more compelling, we have the fact that the IEC and Electoral Court delayed the hearing of our matter by close to a month,” he said. “It would be very difficult for the court to turn a blind eye to the severe prejudice caused to not only new parties, but also to the voting public of South Africa who are effectively robbed of supporting the parties of their choice for five long years."