Tshwane elections: EFF back in third spot as ANC, DA battle for lead

Day three into the counting of the municipal elections ballots has seen the EFF back as the third biggest party in the Tshwane metro, as the DA and ANC battled for the lead, with only a 7.37% difference between the two.

On the Tshwane election board results on Wednesday morning, the DA was leading with 35.02%, the ANC was at 32.44 % and EFF 10.24%.

Nationally, 69% of the votes were counted.

On Tuesday, the EFF’s third spot was taken by Freedom Front Plus (FF Plus) but as more votes streamed in the party improved its position.

EFF treasurer-general Omphile Maotwe told Rekord the party was anticipating to improve its position.

“The wards in which we have more voters are yet be filtered in the election board results and we believe we will do better,” she said.

Maotwe said they were confident that they stood a chance to win the elections.

“The FF Plus and the DA, their constituency is limited. The votes that were counted before (Monday and Tuesday) are the votes coming from small wards and those are normally in the suburban areas.

“The votes where the EFF is strong are big wards and the capturing of those wards has not been filtered through the IEC.”

Maotwe said the breakaway of former Tshwane acting DA mayor Abel Tau to ActionSA would see the DA lose votes in the region.

While EFF also had its own issues months before elections in the region which saw its leadership dissolved, she believed their voters would grow.

She said they were not happy over the IEC’s voter management devices (VMD) which residents in areas such as Soshanguve reported to be faulty after their names did not appear on the roll.

She, however, did not indicate that the party would challenge the results.

Despite government declaring the voting day a holiday, Maotwe blamed low voter turnout on the state saying that it should have ensured it was a trade-free day.

“There must have been no shops opened and no one working. On Monday, I went to Hammanskraal and the malls were packed. The opening of places of work was also a factor in the low voter turnout,” she said, blaming the IEC.

“The frustration of voters by the system also played a factor in the voter turnout. The IEC and government should take responsibility for the low voter turnout.”

Maotwe said the low voter turnout was concerning and should be an issue that parliament looks into.

During a press briefing on Monday, IEC senior electoral matters manager Granville Abrahams said on election day they found that there were 67 000 voters who registered, but were not uploaded on the system.

He said they tried to upload the voters and 35 000 of them cast their votes.

Leaving 32 000, Abrahams said of those 6 000 were scanned at stations and were not able to vote as they did not appear on the system.

“To ensure that these voters do not miss out we sent out SMSes to the voters asking them to return to the stations to vote.”

He said they had fixed the problems with the system.

On issues of the system not working due to connectivity, Abrahams said it was not possible that voters would be turned away because the system was offline.

“I do not know where the narrative comes from about the VMD being offline and hampering the voting process. The VMD is fully equipped to operate in offline mode. There is no truth to VMD being offline and, therefore, delaying the process,” he said.

“We are aware of one occurrence throughout the day where we had brief delays on the machines but we quickly remedied that by instructing all our stations to restart the machines and the processing happened smoothly after that.”

He said there were no issues regarding the system that they could not deal with effectively.