South Africans have become used to voting, a political analyst said about Wednesday’s quiet and uneventful local government elections.
”We are used to voting by now and local elections have always been ‘lower temperature’ elections than national elections,” a political analyst at the University of Stellenbosch, Hennie Kotze, said on Wednesday.
He said considering the discontent among communities over service delivery, it should have been expected that the elections would have been more heated, though.
Kotze said a voter turnout of about 50% is expected, but his estimate is about 40%.
Final voter turnout figures will only be available over the weekend, the independent Electoral Commission (IEC) said earlier.
According to Kotze, there were two main reasons for people not voting.
Firstly, many people were of the opinion that their vote would not matter, so they did not vote. Secondly, people were disappointed with the service delivery of the ruling party, but they were not prepared to vote for another party, and therefore also abstained from voting.
The worst problems on Wednesday were caused by heavy overnight rain, which had left several voting stations flooded and access roads under water. In some areas, ballot papers had to be flown in by helicopter.
In Khutsong, on the far West Rand, 13 people were arrested after police used rubber bullets and a water cannon.
The IEC had received unconfirmed reports of planned marches at Kuruman in the Northern Cape, while a group of people was arrested in Limpopo after holding the electoral officer in Thabazimbi hostage on Tuesday night. They accused him of being biased towards one party. It was not known which party this was supposed to be.
Earlier, President Thabo Mbeki said that there was peace everywhere in the country as people went to voting stations to cast their ballots.
He appealed to people who had not yet voted to do so.
”I do hope all of us, as responsible citizens, will go out and vote,” he said during a visit to the IEC operations centre in Pretoria.
He said the focus should not only be on Khutsong, where residents had recently violently protested against their area’s redemarcation from Gauteng to the North West.
”Khutsong is only a fraction of 1% of the 21-million voters,” Mbeki said. ”I understand why you ask about it, but let’s not concentrate on them alone.”
Counting of votes would only start after 7pm, when the voting stations closed. It was not yet clear when the first results would be published. It was expected that counting would be completed by Saturday. — Sapa