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The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) Elections 2024 on Thursday said, various voting stations in the province had to revert to manual voting after their machines went offline on Wednesday morning as South Africa citizens came out to exercise their franchise at the 2024 general presidential elections.
The Commission stressed that the technical issues affected the swift release of the poll results.
Speaking to Eyewitness News at the Bloemfontein Results Operation Centre on Thursday, IEC officials said the counting process has also been affected, adding that, only just over 100,000 votes have been confirmed so far in Free State.
"Nearly 1.5 million people in the province registered to vote, but the IEC said it cannot confirm the number of those who actually voted because of the system glitches experienced."
Provincial Electoral Officer Jabulani Shabalala said, “We have glitches with our VMD [Voter Management Devices]. If we had used them throughout the day, we’d know the voter turnout, but unfortunately, we had to rely on a manual process, so we can’t say for sure how many people turned out to vote.”
There has been no recent change in the results board, but Shabalala said things might change in the afternoon.
Among those running for the presidential seat in South Africa's election which took place on Wednesday included; Current South African president and head of the ANC, Ramaphosa Cyril, (ACN) John Steenhuisen (DA), Jacob Zuma; new uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), Julius Malema (EFF), Velenkosini Hlabisa (IFP) among others.
So far, the Leading party by voting district (voting station) Support ANC had 42.92% with 837,866 votes while DA, 25.10% with 490,035 votes and then EFF with 8.68% and169,534 votes.
