The ANC wants to block the DA from joining its appeal case at the Electoral Court against the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s (IEC) refusal to accept a list of candidates from six municipalities that were not “submitted” by the deadline.This comes after the DA this week filed opposing papers asking the Electoral Court to grant it leave to intervene in the ANC’s appeal.The DA argued that allowing the ANC to field its candidates in the affected municipalities after the deadline would prejudice the political parties that complied with the IEC’s timeline and managed to submit all lists by the deadline.The ANC, argued the DA, is asking the IEC to change its rules to suit the party.In a statement released on Wednesday, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said its case was against a decision taken by the IEC which has nothing to do with the DA, and the IEC was capable of defending itself and did not require the DA to intervene in any way.“The DA has no quarrel with the commission and no quarrel with the law. Its quarrel is with the voters of six municipalities who might choose somebody other than the DA. Nothing the ANC asks for takes a single DA candidate off any ballot,” said Mbalula. “What the DA asks for takes 2,274, and 44 of the 45 parties they belong to are not the ANC.”The ANC argued it had loaded its list of councillors in the affected municipalities on the IEC system but could not successfully click the “submit” button due to technical glitches.The ANC wants the IEC to recognise the lists captured on its system as having been submitted despite its administrators having been unable to move on to the next step of submission, arguing the failure was due to glitches on the IEC’s online candidate nomination system (OCNS).The six affected municipalities the ANC risks losing are the Eastern Cape’s Port St Johns, Ngquza Hill, Walter Sisulu and Sundays River Valley, KwaZulu-Natal’s uMshwathi and Free State’s Mangaung. In Port St Johns and Ngquza Hill, the ANC failed to submit a single candidate, meaning should it lose its appeal, the party will not appear on the ballot paper.“The fairness of these elections would be fundamentally undermined if the ANC were allowed to nominate candidates who had not been submitted by the deadline in accordance with the commission’s prescribed requirements. That would violate the right to free and fair elections of the DA, its candidates, its supporters, and the public,” the DA argued in a founding affidavit by its member Werner Horn.“The ANC’s basic complaint is: It uploaded or ‘captured’ its candidate nominations by the deadline, but did not push the ‘submit as final’ button. As the information was available to the commission, the capturing without submitting should still be regarded as submission.”The DA argued that going into the system, the ANC was well aware that merely capturing its candidates on the system was not regarded as having submitted them. The final step of the process was clicking “submit”, and the DA argued the ANC understood this because it completed this step in all the other 251 municipalities for which it submitted its list of candidates.The reason why the IECs OCNS system does not regard capturing as submitted was to allow political parties to have flexibility should they want to make amendments in the months when the process was open.“If captured candidates were regarded as submitted and final it would mean parties who intentionally did not submit candidate lists would participate in elections they did not wish to participate in, or field candidates they did not wish to field,” the DA contended.“Capturing is the same as preparing a draft for submission. Submitting as final is the act of handing the final documents to the commission. The ANC did the former, but not the latter.”The DA said that the ANC accepts it “did not submit” its list of candidates in the six municipalities in question and that should be the “beginning and the end of the case”.“There is no discretion to permit the ANC to field candidates where it did not submit them by the deadline,” the party argued.Mbalula said the ANC had briefed its lawyers to oppose the DA’s leave to intervene, arguing the DA has no interest and nothing to add in the case.The question before the Electoral Court is whether the ANC’s lists were submitted before the deadline under the Municipal Electoral Act, the party said, adding this was strictly between the ANC and the IEC.“The DA’s only interest is electoral. It contests the six municipalities concerned, among them the Mangaung metro, and it would prefer to contest them with fewer opponents on the ballot,” said Mbalula.“A wish to see a competitor kept off a ballot is not an interest a court exists to protect. Should the court nonetheless admit the DA, the ANC will ask that its participation be confined to argument, that it be permitted to cause no delay, and that no extension of the commission’s timetable follows from its admission.”TimesLIVE