KIRSTI BUICK
The IEC announced today that a re-election is to be held early next year. This following recommendations made by the Independent Monitoring Body (IMB), who, after a meeting on 17 October, declared the 2011/2012 Student Parliamentary elections “free but not fair”.
The IMB declared that on the day of the elections, “AfriForum Youth distributed pamphlets which had not been approved by the IEC”. In their statement, the IMB cites the pamphlets, which featured pictures of various AfriForum candidates, and read “Vote for the AfriForum candidate in your faculty”. The pamphlets featured candidates from all but the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Theology. The IMB believe this gave these AfriForum candidates an unfair advantage, and thus suggested a re-election in the relevant faculties.
On 26 October, the Special Elections Court informed the IEC that they agreed with the IMB’s findings, agreeing to withhold this year’s results and schedule a re-election to be held in the five affected faculties next year.
The IEC has declared that although the results from the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Theology, the Residence constituency and the Societies constituency will be carried over from this year’s elections, the results in these sectors will be announced along with the results of the re-election.
The re-election date has not yet been announced, but the IEC have assured candidates that they can expect them to take place “as early as possible in 2012”.
