The Constitutional Court has become the arena where the meaning of a single software button will be decided, with the African National Congress arguing that the Electoral Commission of South Africa attached legal force to a feature that no legislation or regulation actually prescribes. At the heart of the dispute is the “Submit as Final” button on the commission’s Online Candidate Nomination System, and whether a political party that completed and saved its nomination documents before a statutory deadline, but never clicked that button, has complied with the law.
The ANC missed the candidate nomination deadline in six municipalities: Port St Johns, Ngquza Hill, Walter Sisulu and Sundays River Valley in the Eastern Cape; Mangaung in the Free State; and uMshwathi in KwaZulu-Natal. The commission had the details of 181 candidates for those municipalities on its system before the nomination deadline, the party told the court.
Representing the ANC, advocate Daniel Berger argued that the party had complied with the law by completing the electronic nomination forms and uploading the required annexures before the 5pm deadline on 28 August. “The ANC completed all the electronic forms in the system and uploaded all the annexures in the system before the 5pm deadline. Therefore, the ANC complied. The regulation says nothing about an additional or final step after all the annexures have been loaded into the IEC system,” Berger said.
The party’s case, as presented to the court, is that its candidates’ records had been uploaded and captured in the commission’s database before the deadline, but that technical glitches prevented it from completing the final confirmation step. Berger told the judges that, by the deadline, the commission had the required candidate information on its system and the ANC had paid the necessary fees to register its candidates.
The commission disputes this account. It maintains that its online nomination portal functioned properly and that saving information on the system does not constitute a formal submission. The commission argues that the deadlines must be applied consistently to all affected political parties in order to protect the integrity of the electoral process. That position places the accountability question squarely before the Constitutional Court: whether an administrative feature introduced by the commission itself can function as a binding legal requirement, or whether compliance must be measured against what the legislation and regulations actually say.
Berger argued that the “Submit as Final” button did not itself submit the documents, which had already been uploaded. “The requirement for the button appears in no act and in no regulations. It appears only on a screen and in the manual of the OCNS,” he said, referring to the Online Candidate Nomination System. The feature, he noted, was introduced on the commission’s website in 2016. In his submission, a software feature should not be elevated into a legal requirement when it was not prescribed by legislation.
The Democratic Alliance has sided with the commission, arguing that allowing the ANC to rectify its nomination submissions would undermine the 4 November local government elections. Berger rejected that framing. “To say that the ANC experienced problems with the system is not to undermine the work or the integrity of the commission,” he said. He told the court the party’s case rested on the interpretation of the legislation governing candidate nominations and the status of the button itself. He argued that the DA had conceded the button was not law, although the opposition party maintained that the online nomination system formed part of the framework through which electoral legislation was implemented.
Berger compared the ANC’s uploading of documents to physically delivering nomination papers, arguing that the information had been submitted to the commission before the deadline. The party, he said, was not seeking to reopen the nomination period, but wanted the commission to accept the candidates whose details had been uploaded. “The ANC asks for no indulgence and no special treatment. Contrary to what the Commission and the [Democratic Alliance] say in their affidavit, the ANC seeks no condonation, no extra time, nor to place any extra information before the Commission,” Berger said.
Deputy Chief Justice Mlambo pressed Berger on the requirement that parties and candidates submit their nominations in the prescribed manner, including completing and uploading the relevant forms. “What do you say to the argument, I think it’s the DA’s argument that says: If you’ve completed, as you say, the forms but by the deadline you have not pressed ‘Submit as Final’, then you have not completed the form?” Mlambo asked.
“We say: When you complete the form and you save the form on the commission system, you have submitted everything,” Berger replied. Clicking the button, he argued, merely notified the commission that a party’s submission was final and did not constitute the submission itself. Further coverage of the hearing is available at https://mg.co.za/politics/2026-10-12-anc-tells-concourt-iec-s-submit-as-final-button-is-not-mandatory/ and the court’s eventual ruling will determine how strictly the commission’s digital procedures bind the parties that use them.