With the new registration requirements imposed on parties as-yet unrepresented in Parliament, small parties and new ones face a high barrier of entry, namely that they must collect a portion of signatures representing a certain proportion of the constituency in which they aim to represent themselves. In practice, this barrier is approximately 14 000 signatures.

With just one day to go, the race to get to the starting line is proving fierce.

The Referendum Party faces a difficult hurdle - despite having collected enough valid signatures to contest all ballots, provincial, regional and national, the IEC have rejected them. This contradicts explicit communications from IEC officials confirming that electronic signatures would be accepted.

As a consequence, the RP will be seeking legal action in the electoral courts. The argument for the rejection of the signatures hinges on what counts as a valid signature, a concept that will be challenged on the basis of comparable methods of voter identification used by the department elsewhere, as well as the precedents established for digital signatures in case law.

The issue in question was the use of a checkbox instead of a physical signature. The IEC itself allows the use of digital signatures in the form of checkboxes to register voters both at home and overseas, but did not consider the format valid. There was no official guidance from the IEC at the start of the registration process on what format the signatured had to be submitted in.

The Cape Independence Party on the other hand, went for a small box where signatories could draw a signature with their cursor, reducing the ambiguity of the signature's validity. Their signature form can be found here.

However, they started collecting signatures rather late, and as a consequence were mocked by regime-aligned media for only having achieved 200 signatures on the first day. CIP leader Jack Miller has since issued a public statement that they are in fact halfway to achieving the required 7 200 signatures for contesting the provincial ballot, and should meet the target before the deadline on the 8th of March, having passed the 5 000 mark at the time of writing.

In the meantime, independent RP supporters rushed to put together a new form to make sure the RP had a backup in case the lawsuit was lost in the electoral courts. The link to that signature form can be found here. The RP has passed the 8 000 mark at the time of writing.

The CIP has been advocating for the independence of the Western Cape since 2007, and garnered 19,180 votes in the 2021 municipal elections, securing two seats in the City of Cape Town council.

The RP, as an offshoot of the Cape Independence Advocacy Group, has in the meantime managed to gather what appears to be a significantly larger support base in a shorter time period, with defections from the CIP and DA along the way.

CapeXit, a passive mailing list group often confused with a political party, which carries a database of just over 800 000 supporters, has refused to use their mailing list to assist the parties in attaining the signatures.

If these efforts fail, we could well see the Vryheidsfront Plus become the last hope for independence.