Plan B with Rebecca Davis

The Concord ruling, yesterday I was thinking it's probably going to go the way of the ANC, but it's going to be a split judgment.

And I'm absolutely certain that Justice Kate Savage is going to be in the minority.

Hey, I got that right.

But that's as much as I understand.

I mean, I do think, John, that although South African politics is often baffling politics, absurd, slightly ludicrous.

This has been one of the more peculiar incidents in our recent body politics because I think so many reasonable people are just approaching this from the position of common sense and going, well, they just didn't submit in time.

It is that simple.

How is it even possible that the Concord have found that this was Does this mean that the IEC is not allowed to set rules? And obviously, we haven't seen the reasoning behind the judgment, which I think is going to be very important.

But it seems to me that.

The reasoning may come down to a very narrow point about whether the requirement to press the final submit button was actually part of the legislative requirements, which it isn't, obviously, for the very obvious reason that laws cannot prescribe that kind of technological administrative method because of the way in which The context changes, technology changes, etc.

So that alone seems a strange argument to me.

And also, I suppose the reasoning would be that even though they didn't take that final step of pressing the submit button, the IEC did have all their documents on the system.

They had paid the deposits, etc., uploaded the supporting documents.

But,

I mean, we all know that if you are applying for a job and you get to the final bit and don't actually press submit, that job application is not counted.

That university application is not counted, which I think is what a lot of people are rightly struggling with.

But I'm interested in the argument that taking those... removing the ANC councillors in those areas from the ballot would disenfranchise voters, which is what the ANC council, I think, argued.

And Judge Matopo on Monday expressed this concern as well, that this judgment could disenfranchise voters because these voters who are intending to vote for the ANC would now be unable to vote for their preferred party or candidate.

And look, Being able to choose between parties is obviously central to the purpose of democracy.

But to me, it seems like a wild stretch, unless there's a legal meaning attached to disenfranchisement that I'm not grasping, to say that not having an ANC candidate on a particular ballot amounts to not being able to vote altogether.

And it's also confusing to me because in the September judgment, the Electoral Court, which signed against the ANC, acknowledged that this amounted to disenfranchisement, which again confuses me.

And doubly so because before the 2011 municipal elections, the IFP had a sort of similar issue where it sent its documents for KZN to Gauteng by mistake and It was a whole thing where they couldn't get it to the right office in the right moment.

And the IEC refused to accept them.

The electoral court initially sided with the IFP, but the con court unanimously overturned that decision and said that there must be even-handedness in dealing with the decision, etc.

It also said that...