South Africa 2024 election: Voting Day in photos
South Africans from every corner of the nation cast their ballots on May 29, 2024, marking their voices heard in the country’s seventh democratic elections.
With an impressive array of 23,292 voting stations available, journalists from BusinessTech and MyBroadband embarked on a journey through select stations in Gauteng.
In anticipation of a tightly contested election, party volunteers mobilised extensively on election day, all hoping to sway undecided voters.
Amidst the bustling activity, we encountered a diverse multitude of South Africans, spanning generations and backgrounds, all determined to participate in shaping the nation’s future through their choices in both national and provincial elections.
Throughout our interactions, a prevailing sentiment resonated among the electorate – a collective aspiration for a better future for South Africa.
South Africa’s electoral commission said it expects voter turnout in Wednesday’s election to be higher than in 2019, with citizens standing for hours in long queues waiting to cast their ballots.
The turnout will be higher than the 66% of citizens who registered to cast their ballot in 2019, Chief Electoral Officer Sy Mamabolo told reporters at a media briefing near Johannesburg. The first results are expected after 1 a.m. in Pretoria on Thursday, he said.
“We are in for a higher turnout than we had in 2019,” Mamabolo said. “It’s the single most intention of the commission at this point to ensure that every voter who is on the queue is given their chance to make their choice.”
The ANC has won every vote since the end of White-minority rule in 1994, but its support slipped from a peak of almost 70% in 2004 to 57.5% in 2019, and most opinion polls conducted before the election point to it losing its parliamentary majority for the first time.
Turnout as a percentage of the voting-age population plummeted to 47.3% in 2019, compared with 85.5% at the nation’s first democratic vote in 1994, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.
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