The IEC reiterated that there were no changes to the results of the national and state elections held on June 2 and to the seats allocated to political parties. It said this while seeking to explain updates it had made to the dashboard of its online results platform.
The update sparked accusations that the results had been manipulated and numbers inflated to favour certain parties, including the ANC.
IEC deputy electoral commissioner Masego Sibli said the method of announcing the results had simply been simplified and that the figures and vote share had not changed.
“Parliament has a two-tier system with local and national elections, with 200 seats in the local elections and 200 in the national elections. All we have done is combine these results and give parties the number of seats they had as of June 2 and their vote share as of June 2, simplifying the information provided to stakeholders and the public,” Shibli said.
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Shibli acknowledged that the IEC should have done more to educate candidates and the public about the Election Commission's election results system, after confusion arose when it updated its online dashboard to “simplify” the presentation of results for state and national elections.
“We thought the way we presented it was simple enough, but in hindsight some of the steps were confusing for people and we had to make changes, and those changes weren't reported as yesterday, they were already in place on June 7,” Shibli said.
“We are in touch with political parties and independent candidates so anyone seeking information could have written to the committee and explained it to us, but we accept that this is a new system being introduced for the first time and it will take a few elections to take hold,” he added.