Live updates with partial results from South Africa’s parliamentary polls reappeared on the electoral commission’s website, following a glitch of at least two hours.
The results are closely watched amid early indications that the country’s governing African National Congress could lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in the 30 years since it assumed governance.
The electoral commission’s portal was briefly blank on Friday morning, but displayed results by afternoon, according to CNBC news.
Reuters reported that the disruption was a result of a technical glitch that technicians at the results centre in Midrand, north of Johannesburg, were attending to.
“The Electoral Commission confirms that it has experienced interruption in the replication of data from its national data centre and the various Results Operation Centres,” the electoral umpire said in a statement.
“The data in the data centre remains intact and the results have not been compromised. All services have since been restored and the leaderboard is working normally. Result processing continues unaffected.”
Election Results
With more than 80 per cent of the results from the voting districts,
the ruling African National Congress (ANC) is in the lead having gained 42 per cent of the votes. However, it is falling short of a majority.
The Democratic Alliance is second with 22 per cent.
The new party, MK, led by ex-President Jacob Zuma has done very well in his heartland of KwaZulu-Natal, the BBC reported.
Nationally the MK party has 13 per cent of the vote and is currently third overall.
To get a parliamentary majority, the ANC may need to form some sort of coalition.
The electoral commission was projecting a 70 per cent voter turnout in this election, up from 66 per cent in the last national election in 2019. The ANC won 57.5 per cent of the vote in that last election, its worst performance to date.
In a pre-election analysis, Africa News argued that this year’s election was seen as a direct referendum on the unbroken three-decade rule of the ANC, which freed South Africa from the apartheid regime in the famous all-race vote of 1994 but has seen a steady decrease in its popularity over the last 20 years.
Nearly 28 million people out of South Africa’s population of 62 million were registered to vote.
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