Pretoria - Ten hours after voting stations closed in the fifth democratic election in South Africa, over 28 percent of the votes have been counted.
According to the IEC, over 6240 of 22263 voting districts were counted as of 6:30am.
Early election results from the Independent Electoral Commission’s (IEC) national Results Operations Centre in Pretoria show the African National Congress is leading the pack.
The results board showed that the ANC had 1943158 votes (about 57.94%). The party was also doing well in the provinces such as Gauteng with 53.2%, Eastern Cape with 74.2% and KwaZulu-Natal with 63.9%.
In Gauteng they were standing at 121 858, while in the Western Cape they were sitting at 229 309. The trend was the same as with other provinces.
The Democratic Alliance following with 975 940 votes (28.48%) nationally, while in the Western Cape they maintained dominance with 586 088. They are followed by the ANC with 229 309.
At this stage, tt appears that the EFF will be the third largest party in Parliament after this election. Results in so far show that EFF have 138 439 (4.13%).
The EFF is doing well in North West with 8.85%, Limpopo with 8.59% Gauteng with 8.26% and Free State with 7.73%.
The number of spoilt ballot papers, from those counted in early results on Thursday morning, represented only a small percentage of ballots cast. Spoilt votes amounted to 49 294.
The province where the most ballots proportionally were spoilt was the North West, where out of 87 868 votes counted, 1 642 ballots had been spoiled, equalling 1.87 percent.
Nationally, thus far the Freedom Front Plus had 35 251, the Congress of the People 22 355, the Inkatha Freedom Party 55 510, Agang SA 6 376 and the National Freedom Party had 38 150 votes. – SAnews.gov.za
