Members of political parties,
International and domestic observers,
Members of the media,
Ladies and gentlemen.
The Electoral Commission is pleased to announce that the results for 70% of the country’s voting districts are now in and reflected on the leader boards in front of you. We remain on track to complete the count, capture and audit of results for these elections in good time.
And we remain on track to record the highest total number of votes cast for an election in South Africa’s 20 year history of democracy. As at 18h00 today, just over 12.62 million votes had been captured on the results system. This is out of 25.39 million registered voters.
Turnout in the voting districts captured so far remains steady at 72.85 percent. At this rate it would seem as if we are on course to see over 18 million votes cast in this national election.
This will exceed the 17.9 million votes cast in 2009 and the 15.6 million votes in 2004.
In terms of the provincial election count, the result in the Northern Cape is complete and a number of other provinces are nearing completion. This is with the exception of Gauteng.
As at 18h00 the following were the percentages of voting districts for which results are in:
- Eastern Cape: 87%
- Free State: 64%
- Gauteng: 43%
- KwaZulu-Natal: 79%
- Limpopo: 79%
- Mpumalanga: 99%
- North West: 83%
- Northern Cape: 100%
- Western Cape: 94%
Of the votes captured and audited so far, 1.37% have been recorded as spoilt.
As announced earlier today, the Commission made a decision to allow the counting of ballots received by 21h00 tomorrow from international voting stations. For this reason the finalisation of the international voting district result will only be done tomorrow night.
So far we have captured 17 905 votes from 106 missions and we await the final votes from the 10 remaining missions. The trend of almost one in 10 voters voting outside of their voting district which emerged earlier today has remained constant.
