Counting election votes is a marathon, not a sprint

Nkosikhulule Nyembezi

CAPE TOWN - I am one of the irritating people who dislikes being told the answer is ‘wait and see’?

But that’s what we have to do in the coming days as we wait for the Electoral Commission to count every vote, tally and verify the information submitted by every voting station, resolve every complaint lodged, and then officially declare the election results.

We must all protect the independence and integrity of the Electoral Commission and discourage those who level accusations against it without substance or valid cause for complaining.

As we wait for the official announcement, South Africans need to take a cue from the Grade 12 learners: keep calm and carry on.

We all want election results tonight. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been glued to your television (or laptop or phone) watching the numbers roll in.

Indeed, the results in small municipalities are rolling in steadily. But, there is still high anticipation for the big prizes in the district and metropolitan municipalities, where the proportional representation system will complete the full picture we see of a mixture of ward candidates claiming victory.

Since 2011, local government elections have increasingly brought strange winners in the form of king-makers and coalition governments. This election has been unlike any other — more contentious because of failure to fulfil promises made in 2016, higher stakes because of the increasing number of new political parties and independent candidates fishing from the same pond of voters as dominant parties, more stressful because of the uncertainties caused by the coronavirus pandemic and exponentially high unemployment forcing millions of people to rely on the informal economy.

It feels profoundly unfair that this year, of all years, would be the one that leaves us hanging as we wait for election results and the eventual formation of coalition governments.

But here we are. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and we are still hot off the starting line. We do not know yet who will become mayors in our municipalities because most political parties have been shy to announce their front-runners this time, choosing to keep us guessing.

We also are not sure how much longer we will have to wait for the successful conclusion of coalition negotiations to form executive structures of the municipal councils.

Even as I criss-crossed Uthungulu, Umkhanyakude, and Zululand municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal as an election observer, I did not hear many people who were sure of the composition of the municipal councils after these elections.

We just have to wait and see the manoeuvring and outmanoeuvring unfold.

And the course is unbalanced. If we were simply counting votes, this would all feel far less stressful — it seems overwhelmingly likely that political parties will retain control of their strongholds, even if it is by marginal vote, backstabbing, or outmanoeuvring though offers of patronage sponsored from the provincial or the national spheres of government.

Instead, the proportional representation system means that we’re all doing the maths to calculate the allocation of seats based not only on the actual number of votes the winning parties received (as is the case with ward candidates) but also on the basket of votes collected from parties that fail to get the minimum number of votes to win a single sit. These “falling-short” votes are distributed proportionally to the winning parties to make each one of them count.

The application of the vote-allocation formula in our proportional representation system affects different municipalities differently, depending on several factors such as whether the voter turnout in a given municipality is high or low, the number of contesting parties, or other mathematical considerations.

And that means that the handful of toss-up district or metropolitan municipalities where there is a close contest might ultimately be determined by the number of wards each party is contesting.

Ironically, this is partly because the current formula used to determine the number of seats won by each party contesting district or metropolitan municipality elections benefit those political parties able to field ward candidates in many more wards than any other party contesting the local government elections.

In the lead-up to the elections, that means campaigning time and media coverage goes to parties with the largest footprint. After election day, it means that in these hyper-competitive municipalities, the application of the seat-allocation formula will unfold in a manner that forces us to ‘wait and see’ for much longer before we can point at a complete picture.

Plus, the outcome will just take a while to predict, with early special voting accounting for an increased number this time because of relaxed eligibility requirements to accommodate any citizen wishing to vote early, instead of being limited to election staff, security forces, and the infirm.

Whoever wins, it will be close in many municipalities close to the hearts of many of us — but a question most people following the opinion polls like me continue to ask is: why do pollsters keep constantly overestimating the youth vote in local government elections? Is there some sort of academic bias that's upsetting the stats? Do they overestimate the online youth spirit of the times and forget that in a long-lived society, this is a tiny fraction of the result?

Are we all in a kind of collective wish-fulfilment dream that “history bends towards progress” before the politically nostalgic majority voting for the dominant parties wake us up with cold water to the face on election night?

Do they overlook the fact that this time we voted on a Monday instead of the usual Wednesdays, and therefore, some citizens who did not show up to vote took a long weekend off away from their voting districts to attend to personal matters?

It is possible that, to them, this long weekend was a rare opportunity to stretch out after a long confinement under Covid-19 lockdown restrictions?

Yes, no one likes to be told the answer is “wait and see”. But the answer is: wait and see.

Nyembezi is a policy analyst and human rights activist