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An optimisation of the data-warehouse extract job was migrated to the live system at 06h15 on 31 May; at 06h30 the leaderboards at the results operations centres, the public website, the dashboard, the APIs and the feeds to media and political contestants all showed zeros, while internal management reports continued to display data. Displays were restored at about 08h45. The commission states that one line of test code left behind during the migration set the ready-to-display flag to zero for all results, that 2,614 voting district results for 1,213 voting districts were captured during the interrupted period, and that no results data was affected.

The Electoral Commission reports that from special voting on 27 May the voters' roll application on the devices randomly wrote duplicate records to local storage and transmitted them, in some cases more than 10,000 for a single transaction, congesting the application pools so that other devices responded slowly or not at all; the root cause was single-threaded execution on Android timing out during voter sessions. The African Union mission recorded malfunctioning devices, long queues and poor management of counting procedures; the African Centre for Governance mission recorded delayed openings, devices largely offline and some stations voting late into the night.

The party asked the Electoral Court to declare the result not free and fair and invalid and to order a fresh election within 90 days (case 34/2024EC); it withdrew that application and costs were awarded to the Electoral Commission. A second application on the same grounds (39/2024EC) was still before the Electoral Court as of May 2025, and at a hearing on 17 June 2026 the party argued a narrowed case confined to the results-display interruption; judgment was reserved and no decision had been reported when this page was reviewed on 29 August 2026. The African Transformation Movement's application (35/2024EC) was dismissed without an oral hearing on the ground that it produced no credible evidence and that challenging the result before exhausting the section 55 procedure was premature; the African Restoration Alliance's appeal against the rejection of its objections (32/2024EC) was dismissed without an oral hearing for unjustified delay and little prospect of success. No court has upheld an allegation that the count was falsified.

The Electoral Commission's published account is that the functional part of the results system remained available throughout, that capturing at municipal sites continued, and that only the display of the data was disturbed. uMkhonto weSizwe argues that optimising the live system during counting was itself unjustified interference. The Constitutional Court dismissed the party's June 2024 application to interdict the first sitting of the National Assembly (CCT 178/24) on the grounds that the challenge did not engage its exclusive jurisdiction and that the delay in launching it was not justified, rather than on the merits of the allegation.