• After a day of voting the IEC now has the task of counting millions of ballots and tabulating the results.
• Unfortunately, there is already misinformation being spread online, including by politicians.
• South Africans should visit the IEC Results Dashboard, and only that dashboard, for up-to-date results.

Well done South Africa. Despite many roadblocks, the country came out in droves to cast their mark in the National and Provincial Elections 2024 as evidenced by the longest queues we’ve seen in a long time.

Now the job of counting the votes begins as of around 08:00 on Thursday morning, 10 percent of the ballots from 23 293 voting districts had been counted.

We know this because we’re watching the IEC’s Results Dashboard and you should be too.

This warrants mentioning as already there are some claiming victories that are impossible to claim. DA Shadow Minister for Trade and Industry Dean Macpherson proudly proclaimed that “The ANC has lost its majority in KZN” a mere 20 minutes after polls had closed.

Naturally, this is a false and irresponsible statement to make, but the MP is not alone as there are several examples of people making bold statements with no evidence to back those statements up. The ANC may very well have lost its historic majority in KwaZulu-Natal, but we won’t know until more votes are counted. Perhaps the MP was trying to be funny, but going by the responses below that post, nobody is laughing.

Given that anybody can post anything to social media and WhatsApp, we urge South Africans to approach any news about election results that doesn’t come for the IEC with trepidation. Send the link above to friends, family and your neighbourhood WhatsApp group to help prevent the spread of misinformation.

Many votes make long queues

The IEC said on Wednesday that it was pleased with the high turnout at many voting stations around the country. Anecdotally we heard stories about folks waiting for hours in queues to make their mark. While voting official closed at 21:00 on Wednesday, many South Africans remained in line to vote long after the polls had officially close.

Unfortunately many voters also encountered delays when it came to casting their vote. These delays caused frustrations across the board and voters spent far longer in queues than they needed to. Some reports revealed problems with voter management devices, ballot box shortages, and other issues.

However, South Africans remained committed to casting their votes, we even saw massive queues at Home Affairs offices (which we open until 19:00 on voting day) as South Africans tried to frantically get a temporary ID to use to vote.

So far, 912 741 votes have been counted and there were 27 million registered voters. As such, it’s much to early to call the results but the ANC currently leads with 42.57 percent of the vote, the DA follows with 26.04 percent of the vote and the EFF has 8.15 percent as of 08:30 this morning.

We now wait for the full election results to be tabulated.