Pretoria - Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi wants action taken against the DA councillors in Tshwane for breaking the law by using numbers instead of crosses to vote during the election of new council speaker on Monday through a secret ballot.
This comes after the DA had indicated it was seeking legal advice on whether to take legal action or not after 69 ballots of party councillors were disqualified during the election.
Lesufi said he asked Gauteng MEC for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Mzi Khumalo to see if there was action that could be taken against the implicated councillors, because “they have broken the law” in trying to bypass the new voting format by the Electoral Commission of SA.
“It is a serious misconduct and we can’t leave it hanging,” Lesufi said.
He said the move by the DA councillors to use numbers was a way of disowning ActionSA.
He also weighed in on a move by the DA to subject its councillors to lie detector tests after they were suspected of having voted for former speaker Dr Murunwa Makwarela to become a mayor. He expressed the intention to use the Promotion of Access to Information Act to force the DA to reveal the names of those who failed to pass the polygraph test.
In clarifying why the votes were disqualified, City’s spokesperson Selby Bokaba said: “Once counting was done, the presiding officer informed the city manager of the results and indicated that there were 69 ballots that were rejected, falling within the ambit of Section 61 (1) (a) of the Local Government: Municipal Electoral 2000 (Act No 27 of 2000), as these ballots had numbers 1 to 69 written on them for one particular candidate.”
The IEC discarded the 69 votes and declared them spoiled “as a result of the mark that was not of a secrecy ballot”.
The DA and the multiparty coalition have lodged a dispute with the IEC regarding the election outcome.
A sole African Transformation Movement councillor, Mncedi Ndzwanana, was elected new speaker after he won against ActionSA’s Kholofelo Morodi.
Ndzwanana was backed by the EFF and ANC while Morodi was supported by multiparty coalition partners, which include her party, the DA, FF+, ACDP and IFP.
Pretoria News