Court dismisses DA bid against rivals' one-name ballot lists

The Electoral Court has dismissed the Democratic Alliance’s bid to strike down the one-name proportional representation lists filed by ActionSA, the EFF, the MK Party and GOOD, leaving intact the candidate arrangements those parties will operate with at the ballot box on November 4.

Acting Judge Mangcu-Lockwood delivered the judgment in Bloemfontein on Friday, after the matter was argued on October 13. The ruling closes, for now, a challenge the DA had mounted against what it described as a deliberate operational choice by its rivals: submitting proportional representation candidate lists containing a single name in each municipality they are contesting, while fielding thousands of ward candidates across the country.

The party’s case rested on how that practice works on the ground. According to DA federal council chairperson Ashor Sarupen, the four parties each ran large ward campaigns while keeping their PR lists minimal. The EFF, he said, was contesting almost every ward in the country, with thousands of individual ward candidates, yet put forward only one PR candidate per municipality. ActionSA nominated more than 2,000 ward candidates while filing one-person PR lists in virtually every municipality it contested, including Johannesburg, where the party already holds dozens of PR councillors but submitted only one PR candidate. The MK Party fielded candidates in thousands of wards while doing the same, and GOOD followed the identical approach in municipalities where it already holds multiple PR seats.

“The scale and uniformity of this practice is precisely why the DA has approached the Electoral Court,” Sarupen said.

The DA argued that the mechanism allowing parties to add names to their lists after an election was designed to absorb unexpected increases in electoral support, not to serve as a campaign strategy. “Parties are required to present voters with the names of their candidates before voters go into a voting booth to choose their political parties, not after the votes have been counted,” Sarupen said. He added that the party believed voters had a right to know who would represent them before casting their ballots, and that the topping-up of lists after seat calculations could be used to reward members who had worked on election campaigns.

“The question now before the Electoral Court is whether the topping-up of lists after seat calculations can deliberately be used as an electoral strategy to avoid identifying candidates before voters get to vote,” he said.

In its judgment, the court dismissed the DA’s application for an order declaring the four parties’ candidate lists unlawful and submitted in bad faith. The DA had also asked the court to find that the lists violated sections of the Constitution, the Local Government: Municipal Electoral Act and the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act. It further sought a review of the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s decision, taken on September 16, to publish the party lists, along with related relief. The court postponed indefinitely the DA’s application to have the IEC’s decision declared unconstitutional, unlawful and invalid, as well as its conditional constitutional challenge, and made no order as to costs.

The DA’s application followed its objections to the four parties’ filings, and it framed the issue as particularly significant after the ANC was barred from contesting in several municipalities for failing to submit its candidate lists by the deadline. The full papers, as Sarupen described them, challenged “the deliberate submission of proportional representation lists with only one name on them, by ActionSA, the EFF, MK and GOOD ahead of the 2026 Local Government Elections, a decision we view as deliberately concealing their candidates from voters.”

Further reporting on the judgment and the arguments around it is available at https://iol.co.za/news/politics/breaking-or-da-loses-court-battle-over-rival-parties-one-name-election-lists/, where the court’s handling of the constitutional questions and the IEC’s publication decision is examined in detail.

For now, the one-name lists stand, and the parties named in the challenge will go into the November 4 elections with the candidate arrangements they submitted. Whether the postponed constitutional challenge is ever revived remains an open question hanging over the 2026 local government cycle.