The Electoral Court has struck down a bid by the United Democratic Front Party (UDF) for the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) to extend the deadline for submitting ward councillor candidates beyond 28 August.The judgment also has implications for the ANC, which has said it will seek remedies through the courts over its own missed submissions.The UDF judgment narrows that option for the ANC because the court found that the IEC has no statutory power to condone a missed deadline regardless of the reason. The exception would be if the ANC can persuade a court that its submission was technically complete in time and that the dispute is about a malfunction in the IEC’s own system rather than about extending a deadline.The court dismissed an urgent application by the UDF, a newly registered party that had asked the IEC for extra time to nominate ward candidates for the November 4 local government elections. The party intended to contest about 110 wards in Cape Town. It argued that its registration was only finalised on August 24 leaving it four days to identify and sign up candidates before the cut-off.By the time the matter was heard, the UDF had narrowed its request. It asked instead to nominate a single placeholder candidate across multiple wards intending to substitute properly selected candidates later. (Supplied) The court rejected this too, finding that the proposal amounted to submitting new nominations after the deadline which the Municipal Electoral Act does not allow.Section 11(2)(a) of the act allows the IEC to amend the election timetable only generally, through a notice in the government gazette and only where necessary for a free and fair election. It does not allow the IEC to exempt a single party while the deadline continues to bind everyone else. The court held that the IEC had no power to grant the relief the UDF Party sought and that refusing a request it was not legally entitled to grant could not be unlawful or unreasonable.“The act confers no power to exempt one party from a deadline that continues to bind all others… The refusal of a request that the Electoral Commission had no power to grant cannot be unlawful, irrational or unreasonable,” the judgment, which was handed down on Friday, said. The court cited Constitutional Court precedent, including the 2004 Liberal Party judgment and last year’s ruling in the case brought by the African Congress for Transformation and the Labour Party of South Africa. Both affirmed that the IEC has no legal power to condone missed statutory deadlines. The judgment comes days after ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa confirmed the party is considering approaching the Electoral Court after the ANC failed to submit complete candidate lists for several Eastern Cape municipalities before the same August 28 deadline.The ANC said a technical glitch on the IEC’s online nomination system stopped a final batch of candidates from being captured and maintains the data was uploaded before the 5pm cut-off.The IEC has rejected that account. It said its system logs show no evidence of a malfunction on the day and has said it will not reopen the nomination portal for any party.Ramaphosa described the Electoral Court as one option among several, alongside direct engagement with the IEC and talks through the political liaison committee.