MK PARTY VS IEC: From vote-rigging claims to system glitch: MK party narrows election challenge

The MK party wants technical experts questioned over a two-hour interruption in the IEC’s election results system, but the commission argues the case is another failed attempt to challenge the 2024 election outcome.

Nearly two years after alleging that the 2024 national election was rigged, the MK party has softened its court challenge, now focusing on a two-hour interruption in the Electoral Commission’s (IEC) results system rather than directly seeking to have the election declared unfair.

Appearing in the Electoral Court on Wednesday, 17 June 2026, the party’s legal team, led by advocate Thabani Masuku, argued that the court should hear oral evidence from technical experts about the circumstances surrounding the outage, which occurred while election results were being processed and displayed to the public.

This is rather a big shift from the party’s initial response to the election outcome, when it accused the IEC of vote rigging and questioned the legitimacy of the results, despite getting millions of votes.

In court, however, counsel repeatedly emphasised that the immediate issue was the integrity of the results system, not a declaration that the election itself was invalid.

“We accept that committed patriots would love to see an election being managed in a free and fair manner. But we say that if that system that they’re using, that they have employed, if that system is compromised by their own conduct. Through their own decisions, those decisions that are open to doubt and questions. That election cannot be free and fair,” Masuku said.

Masuku emphasised that the court was not yet being asked to determine whether the election outcome should stand.

Instead, the focus should be on the integrity of the results system itself, arguing that expert evidence could either vindicate the IEC or reveal more troubling explanations for the outage, he said.

“I’m saying look at the eye on the ball and look at the integrity of the results system. Because with respect, with better explanation from experts on both sides, we could come to the conclusion that in fact the ICC system has integrity and it behaved with integrity, that the downtime that occurred is a normal system failure that happens regularly in systems such as this,” said Masuku.

However, he argued that the court should also consider the possibility that the interruption was caused by something more serious, that the “interference, unnecessary as it was, had something more malignant than simply an innocent, inadvertent, decision to interfere with a live system. The whole country, the whole world