IEC: Voting in Western Cape going according to plan with minor glitches

Voting was running smoothly in the Western Cape on Wednesday with minor glitches at a few voting stations that opened late.

Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) provincial head Michael Hendrickse told journalists most voting stations opened at 7am, with a few opening late due to IEC staff arriving late.

By 7.45am all the stations were open.

Hendrickse said they also received reports of problems with the operation of the voter management device (VMD) at some stations and the use of only one ballot box instead of three in others.

The

instruction to staff is the VMD can also operate in offline mode and the information can still be captured.

When it has connectivity the system will upload.

The hard copy voters' roll was the legal control sheet at voting stations and voters were entitled to vote as long as they were registered at the voting station.

Voters should not worry about the use of a single ballot box for three ballots as those votes remained valid.

“All it will mean is we will take a bit longer to sort those ballot papers but they remain valid and are differently marked for different seats in the legislature.”

Hendrickse said they were finding voters who registered somewhere and did not apply for a section 24 (a) notification, arriving and insisting on voting.

All South African residents must register to vote where they live and vote where they are registered. However, in terms of the new Electoral Amendment Act, section 24 (a), a voter may vote outside their voting district but only if they notified the IEC in advance indicating at which voting district they intended to vote.

The Western Cape has 1,572 voting stations with 52 political parties appearing on the national ballot to fill the national PR seats which are reserved for parliament. There are 34 parties and one independent candidate appearing in the Western Cape regional ballot to fill the 24 seats reserved for the Western Cape in the National Assembly and 29 political parties in the provincial ballot contesting to form the provincial government.

Hendrickse said the police had identified 49 hotspots in the province, 48 in the Cape Town metro and one outside the metro, but he was not at liberty to provide further information.

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