WALLIS AJ obstacle occasioned by the manner in which the preparations for the election have been undertaken or the way in which the election has been conducted. [88] Measuring whether an election was free and fair starts by comparing what happened in the conduct of the election against the public standards put in place by legislation and the IEC itself for the conduct of free and fair elections. In the respects identified earlier in this judgment the IEC fell short of those standards. The precise effect of this on the outcome of the elections cannot be measured at this stage. That involves speculation. All that can safely be said is that the independent candidates were constrained to fight these by-elections under the shadow of uncertainty occasioned by the registration of an unknown number of voters who were not entitled to vote and an inability to identify who these were or to do anything about it. Their efforts were hampered by the late delivery of the segments of the voters’ roll and, in particular, the absence of voters’ addresses, when those segments were delivered. [89] These problems are in turn linked to the problem of registration in the different wards of people not entitled to be so registered. The only mechanism available to the independent candidates to check on this was to compare the segments of the voters’ roll, once received, with the forms that Mr Kham had obtained from the IEC on 1 October 2013. No such process of comparison could be undertaken until the segments of the voters’ roll were delivered to candidates, which occurred only six days prior to voting. While the IEC concedes that 1040 people who were not entitled to be registered or to vote there, were registered to vote in these wards, the applicants contend that there is no satisfactory basis for relying upon even these figures. They said in their affidavits that, with the information at their disposal, it was impossible to check the accuracy of the IEC’s figures. [90] What is the test for determining whether an election process suffering from these defects is free and fair? The point has been made earlier that this involves a value judgement. The nature of the irregularities and their impact on the conduct, as well as the result of the election, so far as that can be assessed, must be measured 46