Electoral Court dismisses MK Party challenge to 2024 results

The Electoral Court dismissed the MK Party’s challenge to the 2024 national and provincial election results on Friday, 25 September, finding that the party had not followed the mandatory procedure for disputing the outcome.

The case centred on the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s digital vote-capturing and reporting system. The party relied heavily on an incident on 31 May 2024 when the public-facing results dashboard and leaderboard went blank for about two hours. MKP alleged that the interruption raised doubts about the reliability of the system and the declared result. Those were the party’s allegations, not findings by the court.

According to court accounts reported by SABC News and TimesLIVE, the court held that MKP had failed to follow the procedure in section 55 of the Electoral Act. It found that the party’s application to review the declaration of the results was not competent in law.

TimesLIVE reported that the court also considered the dashboard incident on its merits. The IEC’s explanation was that a display setting was inadvertently changed while the results system itself continued operating. The report says the court accepted the audit trail showing that results continued to be captured and edited during the interruption, with no data lost and no effect on capturing or verifying the results.

The judgment thus distinguished an interruption in the public display from a disruption to the underlying count. It was delivered on Friday, 25 September; this is a Sunday report on that ruling, not a new court order issued on 27 September.