Johannesburg - The ANC may be leading the vote in Gauteng but it could still be anyone’s game as only 18 percent of ballots have been captured and audited.
This was the announcement by the IEC at their results centre at 12pm on Thursday.
IEC chairperson Pansy Tlakula said that ironically the two provinces with the highest number of registered voters, Gauteng and KZN, had some of the lowest numbers of captured votes.
In KZN 44 percent of votes had been captured and audited by 11.30am on Thursday morning. “This means that we can still anticipate significant movement during the course of the day,” she said.
In Limpopo only 38 percent had been captured, in the Free State 41 percent, North West 46 percent, 63 percent in the Eastern Cape, 72 percent in Mpumalanga and 79 percent in the Western Cape. The Northern Cape had the highest number of captured and audited votes with 89 percent.
In total less than 30 percent of all possible votes had been captured. Tlakula said that thus far there had been a 72.6 percent voter turnout of registered voters across the country and they hoped that this would improve as more ballots were counted.
Tlakula said they had received reports of a few problems.
In Springs, Gauteng, a ballot box with 16 special votes in it was found and police were investigating.
She said they were also investigating two shootings in KZN, which happened in the vicinity of voting stations.
She said there was currently a situation in Alexandra township between ANC and IFP supporters and the police had intervened, but no IEC officials were involved.
She said that even in voting hotspots, closure of stations had happened successfully and no problems with counting had been reported.
She added that they had only received one official complaint on the electoral process from a political party and that had come in from the African Christian Democratic Party.
In Cape Town the last voters were assisted at 11.30pm on Wednesday night, after midnight in Durban and in the early hours of the morning at Joubert Park, Johannesburg, where over 10 000 people were registered to vote.
The IEC said special votes made up two percent of ballots and that counting had begun on Wednesday night on ballots from overseas voting.
They said they were still waiting for ballots from a number of overseas missions, and would wait for them until 5pm on Friday.
The IEC did not want to commit to a time to have all ballots finalised but said they believed the counting process was going well and they would finish way ahead of time.
The Star