Voters in six municipalities will now find the African National Congress on their ballot papers in November, after the Constitutional Court ordered the Electoral Commission of South Africa to include 181 ANC candidates who missed the original August submission deadline.
The ruling, handed down on 15 October 2026, settles a dispute with real weight for the local government elections scheduled for 4 November 2026. Had the court ruled otherwise, voters across the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Mangaung metro would have faced ballots without the governing party’s candidates. The ANC itself argued that such a scenario would disenfranchise voters in the upcoming polls.
The case turned on a technical failure. Last month the Electoral Court found, in the Electoral Commission’s favour, that the ANC failed to lock in its lists by pressing the “submit as final” button on the commission’s online system. The party appealed that judgment to the Constitutional Court, which has now ruled in its favour.
Handing down the majority judgment, Judge Rammaka Mathopa said the court accepted the delay in bringing the application and granted the ANC leave to appeal the Electoral Court’s judgment. Two justices, Basson and Savage, voted to dismiss the application.
The order itself is direct. “The first respondent, which is the Electoral Commission, is directed to do all things necessary to include the party lists and ward candidate nominations mentioned in paragraph four of this order in the lists and nominations onto the ballot paper and all relevant processes for the purposes of the 4 November 2026 elections,” the judgment stated. The court said it would hand down its reasons at a later stage.
At a hearing before the Constitutional Court on Monday, the ANC argued that it was not seeking to add any new candidates to its lists, only those whose details had already been uploaded and captured on the Electoral Commission’s online system at the cut-off. That distinction mattered. The party maintained that the material for the 181 candidates was already in the commission’s possession, and that excluding them would punish voters rather than the party alone.
The commission, meanwhile, had told the court that the ANC simply ran out of time for its candidate list submissions. The party insisted it followed all required steps to submit its candidates on the IEC’s system. Those competing accounts set up the legal battle that has now been resolved in the ANC’s favour, at least for this election cycle.
The judgment carries practical consequences for election administrators, who must now fold the additional candidates into ballot papers and related processes with the 4 November vote fast approaching. The Electoral Commission, as the body charged with running free and fair elections, is directed to do everything necessary to make that happen across the affected municipalities.
In response to the judgment, an emotional ANC secretary general, Fikile Mbalula, thanked the party’s formations for standing behind the challenge. He said the court had upheld the sanctity of the right to vote, framing the outcome in terms of the voters who would otherwise have been unable to choose ANC candidates on their municipal ballots.
The ruling is already rippling through the political landscape. Parties have demanded fair treatment after the court’s decision, and political parties remain divided over the ANC’s win in the candidate inclusion matter. Mbalula has also called for a review of the government of national unity following the court victory, signalling that the judgment’s consequences may extend beyond the ballot papers themselves.
For now, the immediate effect is clear: voters in the six affected municipalities will have a full field of choices when they go to the polls on 4 November, and the Electoral Commission must ensure those names appear as the law now requires. Whether the court’s full reasons, still to come, will satisfy the parties crying foul remains an open question.