IEC confirms shockingly LOW voter turnout numbers

The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has reported shockingly low turnout figures in the 2024 South African general election.

While voters queued for hours upon hours to cast their vote on Wednesday, 29 May, the thinking was that the lengthy wait was due to the high numbers of voters.

It turns out the cynics were correct: The IEC were just taking an absolute age to process those relatively ‘few’ in attendance.

On Thursday evening, IEC General Manager Granville Abrahams said ‘based on what we have on the system, we are sitting on a 58.69% voter turnout, so we are hovering just below 60% of voter turnout, with bigger stations’ results still to come in’.

Those ‘bigger stations’ will no doubt reflect a similar pattern and not greatly impact the overall projected figure.

As reported by The South African website, a record number of 27 723 820 voters were registered for this year’s election.

In the most recent elections in 2019, a record low of 66.05% of registered voters actually queued to mark their ‘X’ on voting day.

It appears that ‘low’ is about to get lower …

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MISSING BALLOT BOX

Meanwhile, the IEC has reported an incident where one ballot box, containing votes that had already been counted, went missing in transit from the voting station Matamzana Dube School in VD 43412767, KZN282, uMhlathuze. 

The IEC appealed to citizens in and around Ward 14 uMhlathuze, KwaZulu-Natal, to be on the lookout for the IEC branded ballot box.

“The commission is required to retain ballot boxes for a period of six months before disposing of them. We are quite eager to get back that ballot box so that it can be placed in storage,” IEC General Manager Granville Abrahams said.

The ballot box got lost while it was being transported in an open vehicle and it was discovered when they got to the destination that it was missing.

“I wish to emphasise that those votes have been counted and they have been recorded on the results slip,” said Abrahams.

‘COMMITMENT TO ACHIEVING ACCURACY’

Meanwhile, the IEC has reiterated its commitment to achieving accuracy in the process of capturing the votes counted in the 2024 National and Provincial Elections. 

On Thursday evening, the commission held a briefing at the National Results Operation Centre (ROC) in Midrand, Gauteng, where it detailed the latest developments in the capturing and verification process following the general election held on Wednesday, 29 May.

At the time of the briefing at 20:00 on Thursday, IEC General Manager Granville Abrahams said the overall percentage of votes captured on the results system stood at 55.6%.

Abrahams explained that the reason the new developments were not appearing immediately on the leaderboard at the ROC is that the commission was still verifying them to ensure accuracy.

“To achieve accuracy, we have various processes, the first one being the capturing of the results. The results slips have been received after being checked, [as well as being] scanned and audited,” Abrahams said.

FINAL RESULTS ON SUNDAY

Given that this was the first time there were three ballots in the National and Provincial Elections (i.e. National Ballot, Regional or Province-to-National Ballots and Provincial Ballots), Abrahams said the Commission had anticipated that the counting process would take longer.

“We did expect that we will take longer this year and to that extent, we did share with the media that we have planned to have the results announcement on Sunday. Normally, we would have it on Saturday,” Abrahams said.