The Constitutional Court heard an appeal by the African National Congress (ANC) on Monday to return its candidates in six municipalities to the 4 November local election ballots.

The ANC did not press the “submit as final” button for those lists on the online nomination system of the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) before the 17:00 SAST deadline on 28 August. In all, 2,274 candidates from 45 parties were captured on the system but never finally submitted, the commission said in its affidavit. That is equal to about 1.6% of the 142,072 candidates who were nominated.

In Sundays River Valley, Walter Sisulu, uMshwathi and Mangaung, the ANC has no proportional representation list. In Ngquza Hill and Port St Johns it has neither a list nor ward candidates.

The court reserved judgment at the end of the hearing, Daily Maverick reported. It had not published a ruling by early Tuesday.

Before the deadline, the ANC said, it had filled in every electronic form, uploaded every document and paid every deposit. Its last record for the six municipalities was captured at 14:53, it said. A requirement that keeps a party off the ballot “cannot be found in the design of a computer program”, the ANC said in its written argument. It said it sought no extension and no exemption.

The commission said the final step was “required by the law” and that uploading and capturing “does not and cannot amount to compliance”. Akhtari Henning, the deputy chief electoral officer, said in the commission’s affidavit that the ANC “ran out of time before the deadline”. The commission said it had reminded parties of the step at training sessions, in its user manual and in automated emails. It asked the court to refuse leave to appeal or, failing that, to dismiss the appeal.

In reply, the ANC said it had run out of time “only for an act the law does not require”.

At first the ANC told the commission that its administrators had been logged out of the system at 16:34 and again at 16:57. The commission said the system worked throughout, and the Electoral Court accepted its version. In its Constitutional Court papers, the ANC said whether the system failed was “disputed, but immaterial” to its case, and that it accepted the commission’s version for this appeal.

The Democratic Alliance (DA), the second respondent, also opposed the appeal. “The ANC’s argument is contrived,” DA MP Werner Horn said in the party’s affidavit. He said the ANC was asking the court “to exempt it” from a requirement every party knew. The ANC said it had set out its reading of the law in a letter to the commission on 2 September, before any litigation.

The Electoral Court heard the ANC’s first appeal on 15 September and dismissed it the next day, with reasons from Judge Modiba on 23 September. The ANC went to the Constitutional Court on 21 September, and the hearing was first set down for 5 October.

Printing started on 25 September. Every ballot paper must be printed, packaged and palletised by 19 October and delivered to provincial warehouses by 21 October, the commission said. The current print run for the six municipalities costs about R612,000, and reprinting their ballots after printing would cost R720,000, it said. The ANC said such costs were “the ordinary burdens of complying with the law”.

In 2021 the ANC won 50.6% of the proportional vote in Mangaung and 78.5% in Port St Johns, the lowest and highest of its shares in the six municipalities, its written argument said.

In their written arguments, the ANC and the commission each quoted the court’s 7 July judgment on asylum, in the Scalabrini Centre case, on reading regulations to see how a law works in practice.

Voters approved to cast special votes at their voting stations do so on 2 and 3 November, and the local elections follow on 4 November.