African National Congress (ANC) deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has said it will approach the Electoral Court on Friday to ask the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) to consider reopening the local government candidate registration for at least one more day following system glitches.

The extended deadline for all political parties to submit their candidate lists was August 23.

Briefing the media, Duarte said the ANC had already informed the IEC about the matter and a formal presentation was submitted to the IEC for consideration.

The IEC has rejected the appeal.

Duarte said amongst other challenges, the Covid-19 Alert Level 4 banned all meetings for most of July.

This meant that more than 15 000 branch and community meetings were held from late July until August 20 to nominate ward candidates.

Duarte said the IEC must consider the fact that there were restrictions during the last hour when administrators were locked out of the system due to the system freezing.

She said other parties had had similar issues during the process.

She added that the deadlines were very hard to meet and highlighted that candidates' identity documents were rejected owing to the absence of voter registration which meant they were not registered properly in the wards where they were selected as a candidate.

“We hope that we will be successful in our bid to [have the process again] open only for those areas for corrections to be made. We are not asking for the IEC to open the whole process. We only want to have the integrity of our lists corrected,” Duarte said.

She added that it would be completely unfair to voters if this issue were not corrected.