Follow the action of today's big polls to decide who governs the country and each of its nine provinces for the next five years.
The IEC’s commissioner was discussing the results of their investigation in the midst of an audit, which was requested by, among others, the DA.
The ANC got above 62% in 2014 and was now just above 57%, while the DA dropped below the more than 22% peak they enjoyed in the previous general elections. It was announced at a press briefing yesterday that the commission had undertaken to release 90% of the results by 10pm on Thursday, but this proved to be overly ambitious.
“Fortunately the election process contains a number of checks and safeguards which together serve to protect the integrity of the process,” said Bapela. She said where evidence was found to support electoral fraud, the IEC would firstly quarantine the results of the affected voting districts and, secondly, would pursue criminal charges against the perpetrators.
She said the integrity of results was paramount to the credibility of all elections and that all election results were only finally captured and displayed in the results system where the commission is satisfied in the integrity of those results. The Independent Electoral Commission will undertake to conduct an urgent audit in order to ascertain where double votes may have taken place.
According to the IEC, VEC4 forms and zip zip scanners in most districts have been returned to head office to assist with the audit process. Twenty voters in KwaZulu-Natal have been arrested for double voting and were tracked down using the system’s information, according to the IEC. Analysts are already saying that the FF+ is likely picking up its votes from former Afrikaner DA voters who feel disaffected with the DA’s more racially progressive policies.
Early counting placed the militant Black First Land First in the far distance with less than 3,000 votes of the ballots counted so far. Early votes generally always come in from the smaller voting stations first, which tend to be mainly in rural areas. The Freedom Front Plus are surprise contenders in the top five race, having obtained 101,492 votes so far, but this could change as the counting and capturing process for around 75 percent of voting districts was not yet complete.
Gauteng is SA’s richest province, contributing over a third of the national gross domestic product while it is also the most populous, home to a staggering 14 million people. The Inkatha Freedom Party looks to be regaining lost ground in its stronghold province of KwaZulu-Natal where early election results show it putting in a strong showing behind the ANC.
The ANC is the governing party in the province but in the 2016 local government elections saw a coalition of the DA and EFF take control of Nelson Mandela Bay, which includes Port Elizabeth, before that coalition collapsed amid acrimony.
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