THE Electoral Commission of Namibia has been given time until today to decide if it wants to fight the High Court case through which nine opposition parties want to get access to election material used in Namibia's National Assembly and presidential polls at the end of November.

The nine political parties and their candidates in the presidential election filed an urgent application with the High Court on Wednesday.

They are asking the court to order the ECN to give them access to a range of election-related material that they want to inspect to decide whether they want to file a further case to challenge the legality of the elections of November 27 and 28.

The parties' application was scheduled to be heard in the High Court on Friday. With a notice from the ECN, informing the court and the applicants that it intends to oppose the application, having been filed with the court, though, the hearing of the case did not proceed as scheduled.

Appearing before Judge Collins Parker on Friday, Albert Strydom, who is one of the lawyers representing the applicants, informed the judge that the ECN and the nine political parties have agreed that the case would be postponed to tomorrow at 12h00.

This is to give the ECN time to consider their final stance on the application, Strydom said.

If the ECN chooses to continue to fight the case, they have time until noon today to file an opposing affidavit with the court, and the application is then scheduled to be argued in court tomorrow.

Five years ago, two of the parties that were questioning the integrity of the 2004 National Assembly and presidential elections, the Congress of Democrats and the Republican Party, also approached the High Court to ask that the ECN be ordered to give them access to material that was used in that year's elections.

The ECN opposed that application from the two parties. After the ECN had argued that the two parties' allegations about irregularities that they claimed had occurred during the election were "hearsay, rumours or gossip" and were "generally vague, embarrassing and bereft of substance", High Court Judge Elton Hoff dismissed the ECN's objections and ordered the poll body to give the two parties access to the election material that they wanted to inspect.

The CoD and RP subsequently filed a second application in which they asked the High Court to set aside that year's election or order a recount of votes. The court later ordered a recount, but the new election result was essentially the same as it had been previously.

When Strydom and Deputy Government Attorney Nixon Marcus, representing the ECN this time around, appeared before him in a packed courtroom on Friday, Judge Parker remarked that it was important to consider what the applicants are asking for and what their standing is.

He said the applicants are "not some busybody international organisation" that wants to poke its nose into Namibia's electoral system, but they are parties who were part of the election process in Namibia.

He also remarked that it should be considered what the applicants are asking for, and specifically whether they want something that, by law, the ECN's officials are obliged to generate, to keep or to assemble.

The applicants who filed the case last week are the Rally for Democracy and Progress, UDF, DTA, CoD, RP, All People's Party, Nudo, NDMC, and Democratic Party of Namibia.

The election material that they are asking to be given access to includes all ballot papers that were counted after the election, all unused ballot papers, all rejected and spoilt ballot papers, the counterfoils of all the ballot papers that were used, the stamps that had to be used at all polling stations to put a mark on the back of ballot papers, and all ballot paper accounts that the ECN received from returning officers at constituencies.

The nine parties further want to be given access to copies of the counts prepared and announced by the presiding officer of each polling station, the reports that the returning officer in each constituency made to the Director of Elections to set out the results of the verification of the counting of votes in each constituency, the announcement of the National Assembly and presidential election results in each constituency, and the announcement of the final results of the elections that was made by the Chairman of the ECN.

In an affidavit filed with the High Court last week, the chief administrator of the RDP, Libolly Haufiku, stated that the parties need the documentation they are asking for "to assess their position in respect of the election and to determine whether or not to initiate an election application" in the High Court.

The applicants need access to the election material to establish if there were any systemic irregularities which would bear out the allegations of irregularities that have come to their knowledge, Haufiku stated.

If the parties decide to file an election petition with the High Court to challenge the legality of the election or its outcome, the Electoral Act gives them 30 days after the announcement of the election result to do so. This would give them time up to January 2 to file such a case, if they decide to follow that route.