JOHANNESBURG, Monday 7 September 2026 — The Electoral Court has ruled that the Electoral Commission cannot exempt an individual political party from the 28 August local-election candidate deadline, rejecting an attempt by the newly registered United Democratic Front Party to submit ward candidates late and reinforcing a strict legal barrier facing parties with incomplete nominations ahead of the 4 November elections.
The judgment, delivered on 4 September and reported publicly on Monday, dismissed the UDF Party’s urgent application against the Electoral Commission of South Africa.
Judge Leicester Adams held that the Municipal Electoral Act gives the IEC no discretion to accept a ward nomination submitted after the deadline in the election timetable.
The decision has wider electoral significance because several parties have reported candidate-submission problems, most prominently the ANC in parts of the Eastern Cape.
The judgment does not decide the ANC’s dispute with the IEC.
It does, however, establish that a party cannot obtain relief merely by asking the IEC or the Electoral Court to condone a nomination that was genuinely submitted late.
The UDF Party was registered by the IEC on 24 August, four days before the candidate deadline.
It intended to contest approximately 110 wards in Cape Town but argued that the short period between registration and nominations closing left it without sufficient time to identify candidates and complete the required documentation.
The party initially sought an exemption from the 28 August deadline.
It subsequently proposed that it be permitted to nominate placeholder candidates in selected wards and replace them later with the candidates it ultimately intended to field.
The court rejected both approaches.
Adams found that section 11(2)(a) of the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act allows the IEC to amend an election timetable generally, through a Government Gazette notice, where this is necessary to ensure a free and fair election.
It does not permit the commission to exempt one party from a deadline that remains binding on everyone else.
“The Electoral Commission has no discretion to accept a late nomination,” the judgment states.
The court found that allowing individual exceptions would undermine equal treatment between parties that complied with the timetable and those that did not.
It also rejected the placeholder proposal because the legislation permits only narrowly defined substitutions involving nominations that were submitted before the deadline.
A party cannot use substitution provisions to create a new nomination after nominations have closed.
The court said strict adherence to electoral deadlines supports both administrative certainty and fairness.
It relied on earlier Constitutional Court authority holding that the IEC has only the powers granted to it by legislation and cannot independently condone non-compliance with electoral timetables.
The judgment referred in particular to litigation surrounding the 2024 national and provincial elections, when several parties and an independent candidate unsuccessfully sought to reopen candidate submissions after missing the applicable deadline.
The UDF Party’s circumstances did not persuade the court that a different approach was justified.
The court said the party could have begun identifying potential candidates and preparing documentation while its registration application was still being processed.
Its late registration therefore did not create a statutory power for the IEC to grant it an individual extension.
The application was dismissed without a costs order.
The ruling has immediate relevance to the ANC’s candidate-list difficulties.
ANC President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the party is considering the Electoral Court among the available mechanisms for addressing incomplete candidate submissions in several municipalities.
The ANC says a technical problem with the IEC’s online nomination system prevented a final batch of candidates from being captured before the 17:00 deadline on 28 August.
The IEC disputes that explanation and says its system records do not show a malfunction that prevented nominations from being submitted.
That factual distinction could become critical.
If the ANC’s case is that candidates were simply not submitted by the deadline, the UDF judgment makes clear that the IEC has no power to condone the failure on an individual-party basis.
If, however, the ANC argues that legally compliant submissions were completed before the deadline but were not recorded because of an IEC system malfunction, a court would have to determine that different factual and legal question.
The UDF judgment does not resolve such a dispute.
The ANC’s difficulties are particularly consequential in the Eastern Cape, where omitted candidates could affect its ability to contest wards and proportional-representation seats in municipalities where it is defending control.
The party has also faced internal criticism over its candidate-management process.
The IEC has maintained that the deadline applies equally to all parties and candidates.
More than 2,200 prospective candidates from 45 parties were recorded on the nomination platform without completing the required submission process before the cut-off, according to figures released after nominations closed.
The commission is now completing statutory compliance checks before publishing the final certified candidate lists on 16 September 2026.
The UDF judgment therefore provides an important legal marker before that publication.
Parties may challenge an IEC decision where they contend that the commission acted unlawfully or that a nomination was in fact submitted in compliance with the legislation.
What they cannot do, according to the Electoral Court, is ask the IEC to selectively disregard the statutory deadline after it has passed.
For the UDF Party, that means the candidates it did not nominate in time cannot be inserted into the November contest through the mechanism it proposed.
For the broader election, the ruling reduces uncertainty over how late nominations will be treated and raises the stakes for any forthcoming ANC litigation.
The next major procedural milestone is 16 September, when voters will receive the clearest picture yet of which candidates and parties will actually appear on the ballot on 4 November.
