Hlaudi's ACM slams IEC over 'drunk voter' video, threatens court action

The African Content Movement (ACM) is livid with the IEC, accusing it of filming a "drunk voter" in a video that has gone viral.

The filming of the video was one of the reasons the party said it would be heading to court against the commission.

This is according to ACM secretary-general Romeo Ramuada, who told TimesLIVE that the party would be meeting with other small parties over fresh court action to ventilate their grievances on how the IEC conducted last week's general elections.

About 27 small parties initially threatened to go to court to interdict the IEC from declaring the results. But they seemingly abandoned that move at the eleventh hour, with the commission going ahead on Saturday evening to declare the results of the election.

The IEC named the ANC winner of the national vote, and the winner in eight of the nine provinces.

Ramuada said they pulled back out of respect for the people who voted for other parties, "because we do not have a problem with the other parties - but we have a problem with the IEC".

"Just look at the video of the voter who was drunk - and the IEC staff were taking a video and making it a joke. So you can just see that everything was loose on the part of the IEC. How can the IEC allow such things in the voting station?" said Ramuada.

Ramuada said the small parties would meet in Johannesburg this week to consolidate their grievances and launch the court action. He said it was not a case of sour grapes, but rather an attempt to ensure "that democracy is not compromised because the trust of the IEC has been broken".

"We are not fighting because we want seats in parliament, but we want a parliament that reflects the will of the people," said Ramuada.

"As the parties we have noted how the IEC robbed us in these elections because they realised that we did not have party agents in some of the voting stations.

"The IEC is not special. People must not think that the IEC is immune [to] making errors, because it is run by human beings. We must fix the IEC because it is our IEC. We do not want it to be captured by people who have their own agenda."

The African Transformation Movement (ATM) and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Party have pulled out of the group of disgruntled small parties.