ANC loses ground in South Africa's 'shake-up' elections

South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) party looks set to suffer a severe setback in municipal elections held Monday, with a low turnout, voting system glitches and a loss of support pushing it to its worst showing since it first contested elections in 1994.

With many areas, especially high-density zones in major metros, yet to finalise their count early Tuesday, indications were already clear that the ANC's performance may well have fallen short of pre-election surveys that suggested it would, for the first time, garner less than 50 percent of the total vote.

The main opposition parties, the Democratic Alliance (DA), and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), seemed to have held their relative showings compared to the 2016 municipal polls, at around 26 percent and 8 percent respectively.

But the ANC seemed on track for around 46 percent of the total vote.

The 'party of Mandela', the oldest 'liberation movement in Africa', suffered mainly from negative voter sentiment around years of poor services in areas it had controlled, as well as numerous corruption scandals, internal divisions, and a suppressed national mood driven by economic woes and high unemployment.

Despite its poor showing, the ANC was on track to retain the largest slice of the vote in eight of South Africa's nine provinces.

The DA looked set to retain control of the Cape Town metro, where it has governed for 10 years, but had lost ground to smaller parties in some surrounding towns and local councils.

By mid-morning the DA had a clear lead at over 63 percent of counted votes while the ANC was at 9 percent.

With many results still outstanding, the DA was leading in most of the municipalities in the Western Cape with about 52 percent of early votes counted, compared with the ANC's weak showing of around 19 percent.

With the ANC falling back in support across the board, winning around half the vote or less in areas where it once was the overwhelming political force with 80 percent or more of the vote, several of the country's major metros looked set to be run by coalitions, as with many smaller centres and towns.

The DA looked to be the biggest party in the administrative capital Tshwane, while the ANC was leading in Johannesburg. But in both cases the leading party had captured well less than 50 percent of counted votes, setting the scene for unstable coalition governance, as before.

In a number of smaller towns, community-based groups of independent councillors had good showings as voters demonstrated their loss of faith in the ANC by picking independent candidates known to their local communities instead.

These candidates were allowed to participate as collectives in municipalities to obtain their share of the proportional votes on offer.

The DA and several other parties severely criticised the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) for its management of the election, despite the IEC's early self-congratulations over its new digital voter management system.

There were numerous complaints of voter registration details having changed, of voters disappearing from the voters' roll, of voters registered in wrong areas and other glitches in the IEC system.

Devices used to register votes as ballots were cast should have provided instant updates to the progress of the poll, but many had functional issues, with some being replaced, and the system capturing the data was down numerous times during voting hours.

The result was that in many wards around the country, especially in metros and high-density areas, processing of voters was slow, some waiting three to four hours to vote, with long lines of voters still waiting outside polling stations that officially closed at 9pm local time.

Those in queues were allowed to vote, but many had left after waiting in largely static lines for hours, further suppressing the total votes cast.

The DA was also especially unhappy with the IEC over the "manhandling" of one of the party's leaders, Helen Zille, who was frogmarched out of a voting station by a large policeman, apparently after a confrontation with the station's presiding officer.

The IEC said it had resolved most of the issues arising in the day, including incorporating the 238,000 voters who were affected by glitches in the voter database, as well as, eventually, getting most voter management devices functional.

With 10,000 troops and tens of thousands of police on duty, no major disruptions took place, as had been feared.

There were some initial problems in politically troubled KwaZulu-Natal province, where community groups tried to prevent access to voting stations.

But the 20 stations affected in that province were soon open and taking votes.

There was a smattering of other incidents around the country with some arrests, including of a voting station worker caught stuffing pre-marked ballots into a ballot box.

About 25 percent of 64,500 results expected had been counted and collated by mid-morning Tuesday, with 90 percent of the votes expected to be counted by evening and the balance taking another 24 hours to tally.

Of the 26.2 million eligible voters in this sixth municipal vote in SA's democratic era, indications were that the total turnout would be around 40 percent, perhaps slightly higher, by far the lowest since the first all-race elections in 1994.