In South Africa, dirty tricks are a staple of local and national elections. Free t-shirts, food, and spurious threats of withdrawal of government benefits are known behaviour.

Generally, because of the difficulty of proving that there is any means of enforcing the implied bribery and threats, most major parties choose to ignore them, for fear of looking weak, of being accused of eating sour grapes.

But some parties are bolder than others, and while the ANC rely on the superstitions of the rural black population to elicit votes from the reluctant. But now the Patriotic Alliance stands accused of worse - not just the ordinary bread-and-circuses and idle threats, but of voter intimidation, direct bribery, and of distributing alcohol, including to minors. And the DA stands accused of interfering with the counting of the votes themselves.

The first of these accusations comes from DA provincial leader Tertius Simmers, though his accusations are limited to the usual distribution of food parcels, and some beer.

The by-election in Malmesbury saw the DA remain ahead of the PA, but saw a near-even three-way split in ward seats between the PA, ANC and DA. The DA remain well in charge in the municipality.

But there are other smaller parties whose testimony of the event should be taken into account. The by-election was exposed to alleged malfeasance from all three major contestants - the ANC, PA and DA -  and all the major parties involved have partaken in acts that compromise the integrity of the electoral process.

From accounts gathered from representatives from smaller parties, a broader picture emerges. Not only the PA, but also the ANC and DA are implicated in the distribution of food and clothing as voting incentives, particularly after the vote was cast. Seeing the PA hand out food parcels, witnesses allege that the DA and ANC rushed to compete for their attention.

The PA’s crimes appear to have consisted of throwing a raucous alcohol-fuelled party at the election venue the night before the election, trashing the event and losing their deposit. They are also accused of bussing in teenagers who were allowed to drink despite being underaged.

Many of the accusations, here referred to as “unconfirmed”, were obtained from witnesses who would not disclose their identity, and therefore could not be included in official complaints to the IEC, which act as an official paper trail.

These unconfirmed accusations include using a sticker system at the Kalbaskraal station at OJ Erasmus school to ensure that those who were promised food parcels in home campaign visits could only collect them after the election by collecting the stickers from PA ballot observers at the station.

Many of the voters complained about PA representatives campaigning drunk, and intimidating them in their homes by saying their observers would be standing at the ballot box, and take note of who voted for whom.

DA canvassers were also accused of more minor acts of intimidation, such as ripping the blanket off a pensioner wearing a VF+ shirt, and taunting here for her disloyalty to the provincial governing party.

Advertising boards for rival parties, including the FV+ were destroyed by the ACDP, according to UDM representatives, and VF+ posters were removed from the election venue by the PA.

But the most worrying accusations of compromising electoral integrity are not just the shenanigans of the PA.

Nor even are they about the EFF, who, themselves were actually a source of witnesses to misconduct, having filed an official complaint against the ANC for withholding the identity documents of voters and offering them bribes in exchange for voting for them.

While these actions are extremely concerning in their own right, do not point to a systemic compromise of the IEC itself.

For that, we must turn to the DA, and practices which can only be assumed to be replicated elsewhere in the country, but by less scrupulous parties such as the ANC and EFF.

VF+ representatives stated that they would not make a complaint about the sticker system of the allegations of handing out drink, because without witnesses willing to come forward with an affidavit, the

The local DA appear to have compromised ballot counting, by deploying at least two municipal employees to the IEC, including the Mayor’s personal assistant. This meant that Mayor theoretically had access to the IEC and the counting process.

Evidence supporting this hypothesis include a voicenote sent by the ward candidate at 23:01, declaring victory by a margin of 213 votes, long before counting had finished. Of course, the count at the end turned out have been 134.

The registration of special votes was also compromised, though whether this was intentional or a result of IEC incompetence is hard to ascertain. Special voting allows those who cannot vote on election day for whatever reason, usually a disability, to vote on a different allotted day prior to election day.

So when a voter is registered for a Special Vote without their knowledge, their vote is effectively deleted. And in local elections, especially in small towns, where results often differ by margins smaller than 150, as in the case of Swartland, where people often know each other personally, pruning the ballot before the vote is a distinct possibility if one can get access to the IEC offices.

When it was discovered by the VF+ that ordinary voters had been registered for a special vote, a DA-hired municipal worker acting as an IEC official told them they would deal with it “later”, and filed no complaint.

At the Kalbaskraal voting station, the presiding officer (also an official employed by the local municipality) denied entry to the second official observer from the VF+ Sharon Geduld, despite being legally mandated to allow each party two observers. The presiding officer in question, known locally as “Vis”, was quoted as saying “I make my own rules here”.

According to Anco Barker of the VF+, a ballot box in Abbotsdale was tampered with, after the ballots were stored overnight in a municipal storeroom, under supervision of the DA municipal office.

While the IEC acknowledged their awareness of the broken seal, they did not act on the information.

After the vote, the laws state that the IEC must get signatures from the observers from each party on the official written tally, but this was not done - instead, the IEC officials only announced the vote count verbally to the observers.

Efforts were also made to cover the tracks, so that there could be no recount: special votes must be stored separately, but IEC officials threw special vote ballots in with regular ballots, and shuffled them into packs of ten to count.

The votes are supposed to be resealed after counting, but without a confirmed count witnessed by party observers, or a witnessed repackaging of the ballots after the count, no legal recount can be done.

This mess shows that there is a vastly greater problem than currying favour by handing out food parcels.

Michael Atkins, formerly of the ACDP, and long-time researcher of IEC administrative error, published a report on the necessity of IEC reform in the IRR on the 7th of November, which should be read in its entirety. The report deals with issues of electoral reform, including the difficulties and contradictions created by the Electoral Amendment Bill, and highlights particularly chaotic consequences for the coming election which haven’t been resolved, including how individual representatives will be represented on the ballot.

But from a private interview with Michael Atkins, it was made clear that the IEC is woefully unprepared for the large quantity of marginal errors which occur at each election, most attributable to human error, a few attributable to deliberate interference.

He has kindly asked me to refrain from specifics, because he intends to present his results in public at some point in the future, at which point the findings will be reported on here by us.

But what he did point out, is that after years of using professional statistical analysis to uncover several cases of voting error, the IEC has shown little willingness to engage with the discoveries.

What is concerning in the wake of this all, is that our elections appear not to be secure, and our electoral commission appears not to have the capacity to deal with abuses or errors.

The coming election is the most important since 1994, and with the ruling party, having demonstrated a tendency to assassinate hundreds of councillors in KZN and beyond, of corrupting the police service to undermine the Liberal opposition in the Western Cape, we cannot afford to let abuses slide, whoever they come from.

The DA, PA and ANC all need to be investigated for their misconduct, and the truth must come out, and until the IEC demonstrates the capacity to take complaints seriously, next year’s election cannot be trusted either.

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