The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has given trade union National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) the green light to register a workers’ party for 2019 elections.
The IEC had initially blocked Numsa’s attempts saying there was a problem with logo and name.
Meanwhile, the electoral commission said it is tightening its systems against cyber-attacks as the 2019 general elections draw closer. This was announced at a discussion held with the media in Durban on Friday, to outline its plans ahead of the upcoming elections.
The IEC’s chairperson Glen Mashinini said, “With respect to cyber-attacks, we have measures in our system to protect and to defend our systems so that they do not collapse, and at the same to ensure that nobody can manipulate the system. We however state that there is no full proof [system], the extent that our election is not fully automated the aspect of the election that is involved is the registration and it is the transmission of the results, everything else in between is manual.”
