A last-minute concession allowing people to vote at the polling station of their choice caused headaches in the Western Cape on Wednesday, the provincial electoral officer said.
”It really is posing problems,” Courtney Sampson said.
However, there was no question that anyone would be denied a vote.
Sampson was speaking after the provincial African National Congress (ANC) called on the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to ”minimise” long queues on the Cape Flats.
It said in a statement that it was heartened by the desire of ”our people” to come out in large numbers and vote.
However, many polling stations in Gugulethu, Nyanga, Mitchells Plain, Athlone and Khayelitsha had long queues.
”The ANC is concerned that these long queues may result in some people turning away and not casting their votes,” it said.
Sampson said by mid-afternoon there had been an ”extremely good” turnout of voters.
”That’s the good news. The bad news is, it puts a lot of pressure on our systems. We are in the process of managing the good turnout.”
He said the IEC’s concession on voting districts, which had turned an exception into a rule, was ”a serious threat to the system we’ve been using so far”.
”Once you turn an exception into a rule you can’t continue as you have been,” he said.
”Normally voters go to where the ballot papers are, but now the IEC has to take the ballot papers to where the voters are and it is a moving target.”
Allowing people to vote in any district had also meant officials were spending a lot more time checking voters’ details and getting them to fill in the VEC4 application form.
He said that during the course of the day, the IEC abandoned the forms and started merely keeping a register of voters from other stations.
Sampson warned earlier in the week that the system could result in an administrative nightmare.
Asked if he was angry about what had happened, he said: ”I have been. We are going to have to rethink the whole basis of voting districts now. We might as well scrap voting districts under such conditions.”
Sampson said queues were unpleasant both for those who had to stand in them and those who had to manage them.
However, all voters in queues at the close of polling on Wednesday night could be dealt with, he promised.
Polling stations would process everybody ”even if it takes until when”.
Presiding officer Clive Christians at the Tommy Rendell Moths Shellhole polling station in Brooklyn, Cape Town, told Sapa it appeared many people registered at other stations had come to his because they were looking for a shorter queue.
He expected a 100% turnout of the 1 600 registered voters in his area but predicted that at least 2 000 voters would have cast their ballots there by the end of the day.
Independent Democrats (ID) provincial secretary Rodney Lentit said there had been problems in Atlantis and several parts of the Cape Flats when people wanted to vote at other stations, and those stations did not have enough application forms.
When he told the IEC provincial office, they had promised to send out supplies.
The ID had taken the names of those of its supporters who were unable to vote, and they would be fetched once the forms arrived.
More than 800 people pitched up at the Yeoville polling station in Johannesburg before it even opened on Wednesday.
Presiding officer Modisang Mocumi said most of them came from neighbouring stations.
In the Free State, where some stations apparently ran out of ballot papers, the IEC solved the problem by getting excess ballots delivered from quieter voting stations to busier ones.
Some ballot papers were also supplied from warehouse stock.
There were reports from several areas of polling stations running out of ballot boxes. — Sapa