New tools speed up municipal voting in South Africa
By the AFREEQUE newsroom, based on Daily Maverick
New scanners and protocols sped up voter processing at many polling stations during South Africa’s municipal elections, in which 29.2 million people were registered. The Independent Electoral Commission said 3.5 million voters had cast ballots before 10am, despite persistent queues at some stations, Daily Maverick reports.
More than 3.5 million South Africans had voted by 10am on Wednesday 4 November in the municipal elections, out of 29.2 million registered voters across 23,696 polling stations. The Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) said fewer than 1% of stations had opened late, mainly because of bad weather, Daily Maverick reports.
The IEC required voters to cast their ballots only at the station where they were registered. Its director-general, Sy Mamabolo, explained that trained volunteers and new equipment, including handheld barcode scanners and sequence numbers, had been deployed to speed up the processing of queues, according to Daily Maverick.
By 4pm, 40% of registered voters had voted, compared with 44% over the entire day during the 2021 municipal elections. At 5pm, the provisional figures released by Sy Mamabolo showed 12 million votes, including three million in Gauteng and 2.5 million in KwaZulu-Natal.
Voting was generally smooth at the stations visited by Daily Maverick, although waiting times varied from one site to another. President Cyril Ramaphosa was due to vote at a station in Johannesburg.
