Elections technically smooth

Government is pleased with the success of the local government elections that took place yesterday, with only minor technical glitches experienced.

The Independent Electoral Commission's (IEC's) chief electoral officer Pansy Tlakula also says, despite the few operational glitches, the country's fourth local government elections "went well".

Speaking at the Results Operation Centre last night, Tlakula said the voting went well throughout the country and was still going well in those areas where voting stations were still open.

“The IEC will allow those voters who arrived in their station perimeters before 7pm to vote. No-one will be denied their right to vote.”

Some voting stations in KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Mpumalanga were still open at 10pm on Wednesday night.

“We are happy with the process so far. Some of the challenges we experienced earlier in the morning continued. However, none of these challenges are insurmountable,” said Tlakula.

She added that some of the challenges faced were insufficient ballot papers at some voting stations, technical problems with scanners and power outages, but where power outages were experienced generators were brought in.

Government spokesperson Jimmy Manyi says government was pleased with Eskom during the elections.

“All the power stations, sub-stations and transmission stations have been on alert to prevent any kind of systems breakdown and, as a result, no power outages were experienced. The two minor outages [Wednesday] morning were as a result of problems in the specific municipalities and were quickly addressed. Overall, Eskom did very well in ensuring a constant power supply to ensure the success of the election.”

Officials blamed the late delivery of voting material, such as ballot papers, and technical problems with zip-zap scanners at those stations for the delay. Tlakula said these minor challenges led to long queues.

There were also reports that a long queue at a voting station in Pretoria occurred because there was only one ID scanner for about 7 000 voters.

However, the IEC says there were 20 859 voting stations and 20 859 zip-zip scanners, meaning that all voting stations had only one scanner each.

“In Gauteng, most voting stations opened on time with voting materials being delivered from Monday to allow 5.6 million provincial voters to cast their votes without any delays. The province opened 2 480 voting stations,” says the GCIS.

Telkom says there were no issues at all on the network during the elections, nor were there any on the virtual private network services platform.

The telecoms company provided the telecommunications infrastructure to all IEC-controlled election-related points of presence for the municipal elections.

It enabled delivery of ballot results from polling stations around the country to the national results centre, at the Tshwane Show Grounds, via 350 municipal election offices, nine provincial results centres and the IEC's headquarters.

“The elections do not happen only on election day. We have partnered the Electoral Commission in the registration process and the compilation of the voters' roll, which started some time ago, and we continue providing communication services until long after election day is over,” says Godfrey Ntoele, Telkom's managing executive for large and government business services.