s-africa-s-poll-s-result-expected-on-sunday-ec

South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has said that the results of Wednesday’s general elections will not be finalised before Sunday.

With thousands of people still queuing at polling stations in major cities across the country in the last hour of voting, IEC Chief Executive Sy Mamabolo assured that all those in the queue by 9 pm (00:30 IST) would be allowed to cast their vote.

Mamabolo was addressing the media at the IEC Results Centre in Johannesburg on Wednesday evening about the progress made on voting across the country.

“No South African will be denied their right to vote,” he said.

He also addressed a wide range of issues raised by the media, from electrical outages affecting electronic voting machines and voters storming polling stations to early closures of polling stations and the residence of a political party leader being used as a polling station.

He said all the issues raised would be investigated.

“We are experiencing a late surge and are processing a large number of voters in certain areas, particularly the metropolitan areas in Gauteng, the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Eastern Cape (provinces),” he said, dismissing suggestions that voting might move into a second day.

“We have no plan for a second day of voting. Voting will happen until it concludes and until everyone in the queue by 9 pm is allowed to vote,” he said.

Earlier in the day, IEC Deputy Chief Electoral Officer Masego Sheburi said that counting would begin immediately after the closure of polling stations, with the first results from small voting stations expected by about 04:00 IST on Thursday.

But final results were not expected before Sunday, Sheburi said, asserting that the process would take longer due to a third ballot paper that had been introduced this year, as well as a large number of political parties and, for the first time, independent candidates on the ballot papers.

Those voters from among the 26 million registered citizens who turned up at the polls were given three ballot papers.

The unprecedented interest from both prospective politicians and voters comes amid widespread predictions that the African National Congress (ANC) could lose its majority for the first time since Nelson Mandela was installed as South Africa’s first democratically-elected president 30 years ago.