Election results by 7.40am. Picture: Screenshot
South Africans went out in their numbers, young and old, to vote and now all eyes are on the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) as the counting continues and the results trickle in on Thursday.
By 7.40am, the National Assembly results were 8.5% completed with counting in 1,980 voting districts counted from the 23,293 completed.
While too early to make predictions, the current ruling party, although slightly below the 2019 results, maintains the lead.
The African National Congress (ANC) had 249,045 votes and 41.77% of the support, followed by the Democratic Alliance’s 27.52% with 164,061 votes and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has 7.72% of support with 46,015 votes.
New kid on the political block, uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party) were in fourth place with 7.54% (44,980) followed by the Patriotic Alliance (PA) with 4.56% (27,175).
In the 2019 elections, the ANC won a 57.5% majority, followed by the DA getting 20.77% and the EFF 10.8%.
In Gauteng, the DA had 56.98% of the National Assembly vote, followed by the ANC with 16.02% and the Freedom Front Plus (FFPlus) at 15.46%. In the Provincial Legislature, the DA had 44.58% of support, followed by the ANC’s 27.98% and FFPlus’ 11.02%.
Meanwhile, the DA had 50.28% of the support in the Western Cape with 1.08% of counting completed, followed by the ANC with 21.21% and the PA with 17.09%. In the Provincial Legislature, the DA had 56.42%, the ANC 17.52% and the PA 15.97%.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the ANC had 38.01% support in the National Assembly counting, followed by the MK Party with 36.89% and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) at 12.69%. With 0.8% of the Provincial Legislature results counted, the MK Party had 39.91% of support followed by the ANC’s 25.17% and the IFP’s 15.49%.
Counting was delayed by vote delayed countrywide. On Wednesday night, the IEC said it roped in thousands of counting officers to help mitigate long queues at the voting stations across the country.
IEC chief electoral officer, Sy Mamabolo, assured voters, that although there would not be an extra day to vote, if eligible voters were in the queues by the 9pm closing time, they would be allowed to vote.
“No South African will be denied their right to vote,” he said at a media briefing at the time.
With some areas were claiming delays of as much as seven hour, Mamabolo said there were glitches they had to overcome, but that the IEC would “service the voters timeously”.
“Part of the measures we implemented was to call on the counting officers who were due to join earlier to assist with dealing with the queues,” he said.
According to the IEC, 27,782,477 South Africans were registered to vote at 23,293 voting districts. While 58,802 voters were registered out of the country.
Counting for out of country results have not started by 7am.
Counting was delayed on Wednesday, as many voting stations across the country saw people still waiting to vote hours after the stations closed at 9pm.
At just before midnight on Wednesday, the first of the results started trickling in and the ANC had 99 (60.74%) of the 163 votes counted, followed by the EFF with 29 votes (17.79%) and the MK Party had third with 17 votes (10.43%)
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