The Electoral Court has struck down the Democratic Alliance’s bid to block ActionSA from supplementing its proportional representation lists, and the ruling leaves the DA with none of the substantive relief it sought. The judgement clears the way for ActionSA to continue supplementing its lists after the elections, against a case ActionSA describes as built on unfounded allegations of “transparency” and an opportunistic reading of the law.
The court rejected the DA’s request for a declaration that ActionSA’s submission of a single-name PR list was unlawful and unconstitutional. It also dismissed the contention that such submissions violated the Municipal Electoral Act and applicable electoral legislation, along with allegations that the lists were submitted in bad faith and in fraudem legis.
Beyond those findings, the court turned aside the DA’s requests for coercive relief. The DA had asked the court to compel the Electoral Commission to declare ActionSA’s PR list invalid, to prohibit ActionSA from supplementing its list after the elections, and to restrict supplementation until after the first sitting of the municipal council. None of these prayers succeeded. In short, the DA obtained nothing of substance.
ActionSA, which led the defence in the matter, welcomed the outcome and pointed to what it sees as the case’s contradictions from the outset. The party argues the litigation was stillborn from its genesis, hypocritical, and anti-democratic in its tendencies. The hypocrisy claim rests on the DA’s own record: the party submitted single-name PR lists in at least 13 municipalities for the 2026 elections, and it has, in ActionSA’s view, benefitted from list supplementation since the beginning.
The anti-democratic concern is more concrete. Had the court granted the DA’s prayers, ActionSA says 25% of the South African electorate would have been disenfranchised from representation in councils. Councils would have elected mayors into office without the voices of voters who stood in queues to cast their ballots, effectively nullifying the votes of South Africans the DA knew it could not win over. For a party positioning itself as a governing force, that arithmetic cut against the public interest the case claimed to serve.
Meanwhile, ActionSA dismisses the DA’s transparency argument as flawed. It criticises the DA for accusing ActionSA of “hiding” its PR lists and centralising decision making, while, in ActionSA’s words, the DA uses FedEx parachutes to place self-confessed sextorters of schoolgirls and doctors with bogus qualifications onto its own lists. The contrast, in the party’s telling, undermines the moral premise of the litigation.
The full account of the ruling and ActionSA’s response is available at https://www.actionsa.org.za/actionsa-welcomes-electoral-court-striking-down-da-effort-to-disenfranchise-voters/.
For ActionSA, the deeper significance of the case lies in what it reveals about the contest over governing performance. The party says the litigation exposed a DA in retreat. Across South Africa, and especially in Tshwane, where ActionSA leads government, the claim that the DA is the only party capable of governing is, in its assessment, unraveling. In metros where the DA does govern, ActionSA argues, voters have come to see a pattern of uneven delivery: services flow to the DA’s own constituents while sewage runs, garbage piles up, and potholes dot townships and informal settlements.
That record matters because the next municipal councils will be seated on the strength of these lists, and the voters whose ballots would have been nullified are the same residents living with the consequences of service failures. ActionSA frames its own governing record in Tshwane as proof that voters no longer face a false binary of delivery to some or to none.
With the case, in the party’s words, effectively put out of its misery, ActionSA says its attention now turns to turning out en masse the very voters the DA sought to silence. The court’s decision settles the legal question; the operational question of who delivers in the metros will be settled at the polls.