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The 27 smaller political parties – which included Mosiuoa Lekota’s Congress of the People, Mzwanele Manyi’s African Transformation Movement, Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s African Content Movement and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania – have conceded and accepted the outcome of Wednesday’s national and provincial elections.
According to the disgruntled parties’ unofficial spokesperson, Manyi, who addressed the media after a marathon party liaison committee meeting held by the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) and the Statistician-General on Saturday: “The 27-odd parties concede and accept the results.
“We were suitably briefed by the Statistician-General and accept that although there is a margin of 0.1% likelihood that there might be contaminated votes, that isn’t enough to hold the IEC to ransom.
“We accept the final results after the briefing by the Statistician-General on the independent audit process in which he revealed that from the 1 020 samples, there was a margin of error of less than a percentage hence it is not enough to influence the outcome seriously.”
The IEC was, however, left with egg on its face following this year’s marred national and provincial elections which were obscured by allegations of irregularities – from the smaller parties who banded together and raised concerns over the credibility of the polls – during and after the voting process.
In total 47 complaints (according to the IEC) and more than 27 registered political parties had written formal complaints about allegations that there were individuals during Wednesday’s polls who attempted to and/or successfully voted more than once.
The parties banded together on Thursday and staged a mini protest at the IEC’s results operations centre in Tshwane. They told the media they had raised concerns time and again about the legitimacy of the polls “after numerous irregularities were detected during the voting and results capturing processes”.
Read: Smaller parties band together, question the credibility of the elections
The IEC was forced to hold a marathon party liaison committee meeting that lasted well over two hours yesterday to try to clarify the alleged double voting and alleged miscounting.
The meeting was understood to have been called to quash scheduled protests that were planned during the declaration of the results scheduled for 6pm yesterday.
The IEC had earlier warned that it would “vigorously oppose any legal action aimed at interfering in the conduct of elections and finalisation and announcement of results”.
In response to a letter demanding that the IEC undertake an independent audit by an auditor of the parties’ choosing and a “rerun” of the elections, the commission wrote to lawyers representing the parties advising that their demands were unreasonable and unlawful.
The commission noted that only it was empowered by law to adjudicate the outcome of elections, declare the outcome and announce results.
Aggrieved parties had ample recourse to raise objections through the normal objection process and, if still unsatisfied, to appeal decisions of the commission in court.
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