Long queues at voting stations in the eThekwini Municipality lasted for at least another two hours. That’s the update from the IEC in KwaZulu-Natal.
Service delivery protests on Wednesday delayed the start of polling at about eighty stations in the area.
Deputy chief electoral officer Mawethu Mosery says stations continued as long as it took to clear all voters who were already in the queue at nine o’clock.
“Certainly difficulties in eThekwini where they started community protest, as well as Bergville and areas of Mdoni in the South coast. But we’ve continued to face difficulties in Bergville as well as in Mdoni. In eTthekwini we had a very slow start. And we’re closing now with a number of voters in the queues. So we expect that voting will continue for another two to three hours in some of the voting stations.”
Meanwhile, Mosery says, voting stations in the Okhahlamba Local Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands in particular, suffered due to the seven-hour delay in opening.
“We have not seen voters until now. And obviously we have to consider matters like those whether we will allow any further amount of time in those areas. Or this is what we call the end of the opportunity to vote in those areas. But certainly we’ve had difficulties and community participation in those areas.
The counting of ballot papers will start when voting stations close while the first set of election results is expected to start trickling in.
Mosery says, “Where we have low number of voters a thousand or less, we may start getting results from those venues just after midnight. We will continue with results probably until midnight of Thursday collating, tallying and verifying them and also auditing them so by Friday morning you will have a better indication of where the province is going.”
