WALLIS AJ “It is a primary principle of law as applied to election contests that it is the duty of the court to validate the election if possible. That is to say, the election must be held valid unless plainly illegal.”76 These are cautionary words that we do well to bear in mind. But they cannot be decisive. For the other side of the coin is that where the integrity of an election is in doubt– “…preservation of the integrity of the election process is far more important in the long run than the resolution of any one particular election.”77 [99] Electoral legitimacy and the integrity of the electoral process are of enormous importance in South Africa.78 Many people, in many different ways, struggled and fought to secure the right to vote for all people in South Africa. It was a right denied to the vast majority of this country’s citizens. Many devoted their lives to the struggle for democracy. Others were imprisoned, banned, harassed and exiled. No-one who was in, or has seen photographs of, the patient queues that waited for hours to cast their votes in the first democratic election can have any doubt that the right to vote is a precious one for all South Africans. The struggle of all those who worked to bring 76 Gooch id at 1327. 77 Fair v Hernandez (1981) 116 Cal. App. 3d 868, 881 [172 Cal. Rptr. 379]; Gooch id at 1327 78 As it is in other countries. In Marks v Stinson 19 F 3d 873 (1994) at 887, a case involving a disputed election for a seat in the Senate of the state of Pennsylvania, it was said: “The integrity of the election process lies at the heart of any republic. The people, the ultimate source of governmental power, delegate to their elected representatives the authority to take measures which affect their welfare in a multitude of important ways. When a representative exercises that authority under circumstances where the electors have no assurance that he or she was the choice of the plurality of the electors, the legitimacy of the governmental actions taken is suspect. Accordingly, where there is substantial wrongdoing in an election, the effects of which are not capable of quantification but which render the apparent result an unreliable indicium of the will of the electorate, courts have frequently declined to allow the apparent winner to exercise the delegated power. ... For the actions of a democratically elected body of representatives to be legitimate, the electorate must be assured that each of the representatives was the choice of the electorate.” See also Bell v Southwell 376 F 2d 659 (5th Cir. 1967) where an election, the integrity of which had been infected by poisonous racial discrimination, was set aside, despite the fact that the evidence did not suggest that the outcome would have been any different had the discrimination not occurred. 50