John Steenhuisen wants the IEC to account for ‘glitches’ during elections

DA leader John Steenhuisen said on Tuesday the Electoral Commission (IEC) should be held accountable for all the glitches experienced during the local government elections on Monday.

He said the party identified 151 voting stations across SA that experienced glitches with their voter management devices (VMDs), with voters turned back “in significant numbers” while some discouraged people decided not to vote. 

“Those people have been horribly disenfranchised. We’re busy running the numbers so we can come up with a quantum of what the IEC’s and the state’s inefficiencies cost us in terms of votes. We would use that as a basis for any potential complaint,” he said.

Steenhuisen said the IEC had five years to prepare for the local government elections and ensure all its systems were in order, but it failed. He said the commission should account before parliament. 

“They do need to come before parliament and explain exactly what went wrong, why it went wrong and what they are going to do about repairing this situation so we don’t have these glitches taking place.” 

On Tuesday the IEC dismissed claims the glitches in the VMDs prevented eligible voters from casting their votes. 

National senior manager for electoral operations Granville Abrahams said the glitches in the devices did not prevent the smooth running of the voting process.

“We are aware of one occurrence during the day where we had issues with the machines. We easily remedied that by issuing instructions to all our voting stations to restart machines and the process happened smoothly after that,” said Abrahams. 

You can keep updated with live election results here.

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