39 out of the 257 councils' votes outstanding – IEC

5 August 2016

Pretoria - There are only 39 councils with outstanding votes that still need to be finalised, the IEC said on Friday.

"Work is continuing to finalise the results for these outstanding councils – which include…some of the largest metros including the City of Johannesburg, Tshwane, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, Buffalo City and City of Cape Town," IEC chairperson Glen Mashinini said during a media briefing at the results operations centre in Tshwane around 17:30.

He said the results would however, be known in "the next few hours".

The results would not however be made official until Saturday evening, Mashinini said.

In terms of the Electoral Act, the commission had to give parties and candidates 48 hours after voting had closed to lodge objections with the IEC. These objections had to however be material to the results, he said.

The IEC had received 49 objections since voting closed on Wednesday.

DA did not breach rules

"The commission will be meeting later to consider each and every one of these," Mashinini said.

A question was raised about whether the DA had broken any rules when it proclaimed its victory in Nelson Mandela Bay on Thursday and in Tshwane on Friday. This was after the ANC's general secretary Gwede Mantashe accused the IEC of leaking results to the DA and promised to lay a complaint with the commission.

On Friday evening, deputy chair of the commission Terry Tselane said the DA had not breached any rules by making the announcements.

"There is nothing irregular or wrong with that pronouncement in the sense that… the commission has provided three opportunities through which the public can get to know the results of the elections, [which] is actually testimony to the transparency that we have put into the process."

He said the results at the individual voting stations, the IEC application which notified users of the latest results as well as the leader board at the results operations centre (ROC) were three avenues which parties and the public could get an idea of how the numbers were looking.

This did not mean that the parties were right, however, as there were still behind the scenes checks and balances that had to be completed before the final results were announced.

ANC objection withdrawn

"Even though the results are here for everybody to see, they are not official results because we still have to go through particular processes, but they give you an indication.

"The lead board here tells a story and we can be able to follow that story and be able to come to some kind of determination in relation to that story," Tselane said.

Earlier on Friday there had been contention about the results in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro after a box of marked ballots were found dumped in one of the voting stations in the area.

The ANC had vowed to lodge an objection with the IEC at provincial level while the national leaders in Tshwane opted to gracefully accept defeat.

Tselane confirmed during the briefing that the ANC had indeed withdrawn its objection.

"The matter related to the ballot papers found where they were not supposed to be…is a breach in terms of our system and we have tried to emphasise this to our staff, that ballot papers are the most prestigious and precious commodity [that] we have as a commission and they must be guarded jealously."

He said the IEC would deal with such matters in the areas where such transgressions had taken place.

The IEC was comfortable with the fact that those ballot papers had already been counted in that specific area, and that the results had been declared and there were no irregularities reported, he added.

This article first appeared on News24, see here.