Election vote counting at 17% – where the parties stand, and when to expect final results
The counting of votes for South Africa’s 2024 national and provincial elections is underway.
As of 11:30 on May 30, 2024, 16.65% of the votes for the National Assembly have been counted, with tallying from 3,879 out of the 23,293 voting districts completed.
Looking at the National Ballot, the results so far are:
Looking at the live counting of the provincial ballots in key battleground provinces, the votes so far are:
Gauteng (8.47% voting districts counted):
KwaZulu-Natal (7% voting districts counted):
Western Cape (29.45% voting districts counted):
To track the full live results of the counting process (including the regional and provincial ballots not included in this article) which are constantly being updated, it can be found on the IEC’s results dashboard.
When to expect final results
According to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), the results will be announced in seven days, but the final results are expected (not guaranteed) by Sunday, 2 June.
“We have always been able to declare and announce the results well within this period and will endeavour to do so with these elections,” said chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo.
“Evidently, we are in for a higher turnout than 2019,” said Mamabolo.
IEC spokesperson Kate Bapela told a media briefing on Wednesday evening that CEO Sy Mamabolo had projected that the country had surpassed the 70% voter turnout of the 27.67 million registered voters.
This is higher than the 66.06% turnout achieved by the 26.7-million people who registered in the 2019 general elections.
Mamabola said that the commission had the duty of balancing two imperatives “accuracy” and “speed” when votes are counted.
“Ballots are counted at the voting station where they are cast – party agents, independent candidate agents, and observers monitor the entire counting and results process and are present at all times,” said the CEO.
“Sealed ballot boxes are opened and emptied. Each ballot paper is unfolded facedown and checked for the Electoral Commission security stamp. Stamped ballots are considered valid. Unstamped ballots are invalid and are not counted toward the results,” explained Mamabolo.
Long lines and delays
Many registered voters who turned up to cast their ballots on Wednesday were met with snaking queues and technical glitches with the voter management devices (VMDs).
Mamabolo said two hours before polls were scheduled to close (at 21h00) that the IEC experienced “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.”
This saw many voters waiting in line for hours on end, with some eventually abandoning their democratic right to vote.
One voter at a station in Hatfield, Pretoria (a student hub) told BusinessTech that she waited over 10 hours to make her mark.
“The line spanned what seemed to be kilometres… when I got to the front, I could see why: there were three ballot booths [for tens of thousands of voters], and everything was done manually because the system was offline,” she said.
Mamabola said that there were “no deliberate delays on the part of the commission.”
The IEC emphasised that all people in the lines were allowed to vote, even after the closing time.
The IEC has distanced itself from speculation that it had an intentional hand in slowing down the voting process on election day.
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