Were the 2024 South African elections 'rigged'?

There are at least 14 reasons to be concerned - but they are more nuanced than the current arguments being made in public discussions

The ‘news cycle’ moves fast, too fast perhaps for proper scrutiny of democratic processes. With South Africa’s shock election results only a few days old, all the largest democratic institutions, oversight bodies and most political parties had rushed to declare the elections ‘free and fair’. One South African research organisation (the HSRC) rushed out the results of a poll of voters before counting had even been completed, with some major media outlets dutifully reporting [see here and here] the conclusion that “Voters overwhelmingly believe 2024 elections were free, fair”.¹ There has been only one real exception, the newly founded MK party which lodged a court case demanding that the elections be rerun. That case was subsequently withdrawn, but the main respondent - the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) - has sought to have it heard anyway.

The MK Party’s case appears to be based on the notion that there was blatant, large-scale rigging of the results which seems evidently untrue. In that sense, the court case is simply a distraction from more nuanced, worrying issues pertaining to the credibility of the election results.

The IEC itself had confidently declared before the election that, “In this country you will not rig an election”. The fact that it took intelligence agencies in the United States almost three years to publish a report substantiating the assertion that Russian organisations had covertly interfered in its 2016 elections should be enough to demonstrate the hubris of such claims and assertions in the South African case.²

Prior to the 2024 elections the only hypotheses about rigging that were entertained by the South African media were, firstly, the possibility of ANC deployees (such as in the IEC) rigging it in the ANC’s favour and, secondly, the possibility of interference from countries like Russia. None of those claims were accompanied by a single piece of evidence – historical or from the present – from South Africa. In contrast, I argued in an article early in 2023 that:

Much reporting focuses on potential meddling by Russia, which is plausible though unproven. But it would be naïve and ahistorical to ignore the potential for interference by Western countries – not least when many important South African civil society actors currently rely on funding from institutions in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and so on. 

Sovereignty means being fundamentally independent of any foreign influence, not only the countries you may dislike. I do not have a great deal of faith in any of our institutions, whether the State Security Agency, the Electoral Commission of South Africa or indeed the largest media groups, including the SABC, to protect South African democracy from such interference

Moreover, as I have written about already, it became increasingly clear from late 2022 onwards that various senior individuals within the ANC seemed to want the party to lose its majority.

It was because of a growing collection of suggestive evidence that I argued in April 2024 that the most important thing to know about the 2024 elections was that ‘the ANC’ – i.e. the two main factions within it – wanted to lose. The person appointed as head of the ANC elections committee for 2024 had said as much in 2017 and only tried to walk back those remarks shortly before the election after they were resurrected on social media.

If it was the case that senior ANC leaders wanted the party to lose its majority, then it also follows that all those ‘ANC deployees’ others had been worried would rig the elections in the party’s favour were more likely to have done the opposite. That’s a concern that has gone entirely unmentioned and unexamined in public discussion.

Since the election there have been scattered claims that the results were manipulated. Many of these have been made on social media, with the notable exception of the court case brought by the MK Party. I have not yet seen any convincing evidence of systematic rigging. However, what does exist is a worrying collection of circumstantial evidence relating to the various safeguards and reference points one might want to use to check the election’s credibility. Those are my focus here. I will first list them and then go into more detail on each in a subsequent article.

14 reasons to be concerned about the election results

1. The reliance by the media on uncredible polls by demonstrably biased organisations. These polls prepared the ground for a large loss of support for the ANC and supposed public support for particular coalition options.

2. The media’s use of ‘political analysts’ (like Lukhona Mnguni and William Gumede) and ‘election analysts’ (like Wayne Sussman) with demonstrable biases, including undisclosed funding sources and other serious conflicts of interest.

3. The covert funding of ‘civil society watchdogs' (Rivonia Circle, MyVoteCounts, OpenSecrets, the IEC’s partner Media Monitoring Africa, amaBhungane, etc) by individuals who were also amongst the most important funders of political parties (Michiel Le Roux, etc).

4. Manufacturing of a ‘grassroots, independent’ election monitoring initiative with formally undeclared funding sources, run by a recent opposition politician who informally acknowledged funding from various supporters of opposition parties and an individual who is the brother-in-law of the White House chief of staff.

5. The manufacturing of youth-oriented podcasters and YouTubers (such as SMWX sponsored by the Open Society Foundation) all with narratives that pushed towards the kind of election result that transpired. For example, the supposedly most impartial of these said in one interview: ‘we need to remove the ANC at almost any cost’ and after the election posted a celebratory message on one of his social media accounts. He had been given a prime time slot by the public broadcaster in the run-up to the elections.

6. The development and promotion of ‘party-voter matching’ apps with unpublished code and undeclared funding sources (among other problems – see 7. below).

7. At least two individuals involved in election oversight – one with disinformation monitoring and one with a party-voter matching app - with professional biographies that show connections to organisations and individuals linked to foreign intelligence agencies.

8. Inappropriately definitive claims by a range of individuals before the election – from the IEC to the leader of the EFF - that the results could not possibly be rigged or manipulated and that they must simply be accepted whatever the outcome.

9. No apparent scrutiny of the process for digitally aggregating manually counted votes - the most obvious area for direct vote rigging in a non-electronic ballot system.

10. The unexplained failure of the IEC’s digital results platform for a number of hours during the counting process, apparently because of a failure in the underlying aggregation process. Reassurances that the data was not compromised do not appear to have been verified by independent, credible experts.

11. Clear bias of all major media outlets, private and public, prior to the election in a direction that meant they were unlikely to apply any serious scrutiny to the kinds of election results that actually transpired. (This has also manifested in the uncritical adoption of the ‘Government of National Unity’ rhetoric despite it being inaccurate).

12. The outsourcing by the IEC of various crucial activities to unaccountable and potentially compromised civil society organisations and social media companies.

13. The reported underfunding of the IEC (with concerns raised from at least 2022) approved by an ANC-appointed minister of finance and ANC-dominated Cabinet.³

14. The removal of top intelligence officials in the year leading up to the election, meaning that the country lacked leadership in combating interference from foreign entities (whether directly or through local proxies) - despite the president in parallel noting the risk of such interference.

At the very least, what the combination of these fourteen observations suggests is that there was never likely to be any serious and substantial scrutiny of an election result that brought the ANC below 50%. Key ANC leaders themselves were happy with that result – as was arguably evident in Ramaphosa’s demeanour in his acceptance speech which was more cheerful and sincere than most of his compaign speeches. Virtually all large media and civil society organisations were evidently happy with such a result, and various media outlets used methodologically flawed research to promote the notion that the majority of South Africans were happier after the elections.⁴

The sheer range of the fourteen factors listed above is striking: from compromised civil society organisations to compromised polls, biased analysts and vacant intelligence posts. So while there is a lot of rhetoric and posturing about unquestioningly accepting election results – as if doing so somehow proves a person’s commitment to democracy – there seems to be very little reason to have confidence in the process.

Does this necessarily mean the election was rigged? No. But it does raise the question: if the election was ‘free, fair and unmanipulated’, why were there such extensive efforts to compromise and control potential scrutiny?

Those who assert that the elections were ‘free and fair’, that the results ‘must be accepted’ and society ‘must move on’, fall back on the absence of evidence. They say, ‘If the elections were rigged, where’s your evidence?’. The problem is that it is unreasonable to expect individual citizens to have the time and resources to investigate at the level of detail and sophistication that would be required to, for instance, identify interventions by foreign state actors. That is why the media, civil society, public bodies, intelligence agencies and so forth exist. But the available evidence suggests none of those can be relied upon at this moment. And no-one with any power or authority is ‘watching the watchers’. So while there may not be concrete evidence, there is also no reason to believe such evidence would be found if it did exist. And what we do have are election results that are completely unprecedented in South Africa’s democratic history.

What is my own conclusion? First of all, to the extent that there was manipulation of the election results I believe it happened mostly through systematic media bias and social media manipulation rather than actual vote rigging. However, that is also what happened in the United States in 2016 and many ‘experts’ refer to that as a case of election rigging. Second, given serious failures in the period since the last election and that key ANC leaders wanted to lose their majority in 2024, it is hardly surprising the party would lose some support but those failures on their own are unlikely to explain the full scale of the party’s electoral decline. Finally, given the extensive efforts to compromise oversight institutions (broadly defined) it seems likely that some rigging was planned if it became necessary to do so.

On the basis of these three considerations I think the election results were likely manipulated, though that may have been done in ways that were either legal or in grey areas inadequately covered by legislation. I suggest that there is little basis to believe claims the elections they were not manipulated or rigged, since there were strong incentives for domestic and foreign actors to do so and few robust protections and safeguards in place.

Let me close with one relatively minor example where it can be easily proven that all oversight institutions failed dismally. The limit on political party funding from a single person or entity in a single year is supposed to be R15million. Billionaire Michiel Le Roux circumvented this by making his donations through two different entities, each of which is counted separately. He was thus able to donate double the legislated limit to the Democratic Alliance. This was widely known and the bare facts were publicly reported, but not a single media outlet (including the public SABC), civil society organisation (like MyVoteCounts which is covertly funded by Le Roux) or public organisation (like the IEC) even mentioned that those donations actually violated the principle in legislation. Nor did they do anything about it. Given such a glaring failure, why would one have any faith that sufficient protection was in place against even more nefarious and inappropriate conduct that influenced the elections?⁵

1. The research also appears to want to promote electronic voting, which is extremely vulnerable to manipulation but more on that in a separate article.

2. The reality and success of the interference has been contested but the sophistication of all these analyses is far beyond the painfully superficial analysis done in South Africa.

3. The Treasury denied these claims: https://www.gov.za/news/media-statements/treasury-independent-electoral-commission-budget-allocations-30-may-2024
However, the Treasury’s stance on such matters unfortunately lacks credibility given that it regularly seeks to downplay actual budget cuts across a range of areas.

4. It has been gratifying to see how many ‘ordinary’ South Africans on social media were able to see that the research was clearly methodologically flawed, even though experts in relevant disciplines failed to speak out on that.

5. See my earlier posts on the many problems with the current party funding framework and the civil society organisations that supposedly oversee it.