We’re into Friday, and nearing 80% of the voting stations counted.

At this stage, the ANC is sitting pretty on 57% of the national vote, which is within the parameters of what many predicted before voting began.

A reminder that the ANC’s final percentage is actually very important, because it could have a massive role to play with regards to the future of Cyril Ramaphosa.

Focusing on the Western Cape for a second, it looks like the DA will retain control of the province:

The party sits on 54,67% of the vote, with just shy of 95% of the stations counted.

Over in Gauteng, it really is anybody’s game at the minute. According to the News24 live results, the ANC is sitting just above 50% with 56% of the stations counted:

The DA will be hoping that the ANC drops below 50% as the votes come in, although the EFF has made it clear that it has no interest in forming a coalition with the DA.

Perhaps this stunt from last week didn’t do the DA any favours, when they projected a campaign message onto Luthuli House:

There have also been a number of election fraud rumours doing the rounds, some of which have substance, whilst others have already been debunked.

Business Insider SA put together a concise list of those, so head over here for a look. Oh, and they also have an interesting feature on the mystery of the disappearing vote marks on the thumb – you can see that here.

For a lighter, but also insightful, take on the election results thus far, we head to TimesLIVE and Tom Eaton.

He’s listed eight points in his “post-election state of play”, and here are our favourites:

• Roughly 20 ANC MPs are about to lose their seats. Accordingly, I’d like to send thoughts and prayers to the various corporate boards and engineering firms that are about to get saddled by one or more of these sloughed-off cadres.
• The Freedom Front Plus has pulled off a stunning upset, and given how stunningly upsetting they have been until now, this is no small feat. It’s an important reminder that all you need to succeed in this world is ambition, hard work, historical revisionism, and a property-owning constituency that keeps being told it is going to lose its property.
• The EFF has confirmed that it is, indeed, a government in waiting. And waiting. And waiting.
• Last and very much least, let us peer through our microscope at the battles raging at the bottom of the list, where micro-organisms compete over minuscule fractions of the vote: curious, amoeba-like things, some harmless or pointless, others malignant, with exotic names like the Capitalist Party of South Africa, Black First Land First, Agang, Azapo, and the African Content Movement.

Everyone is having a good chuckle about the fate of the Capitalist Party of South Africa (ZACP), also known as the Purple Cow party, and we should also laugh at Black First Land First with every bit of energy we can muster.

Ha, you hate-mongering, Gupta-funded imbeciles.

Eaton finishes as follows:

…when one of them threatens racist violence in an effort to get noticed, or wears a Donald Trump cap in a display of frat-boy bravado, let us ignore it, the way we ignore a fruit-fly landing on a distant banana, and continue talking to the grown-ups.

Truth.

If you want more kicks to the guts of those smaller parties, you should check out Rebecca Davis’ piece on the Daily Maverick. First, she takes aim at the ZACP:

The “purple cow” capitalists were always unlikely to win back their R200,000 electoral deposit, having been launched about six weeks before the elections with no existing political infrastructure to draw from. The ZACP had focused its campaigning on suburban Johannesburg — where the party employed the capitalist masterstroke of paying homeless people to act as human billboards — and Twitter…

ZACP founder Kanthan Pillay put it best himself on Twitter when he described his party’s results, with admirable candour, as “dismal”.

Saddle up for the Andile Mngxitama / BLF bashing:

South Africans can also kiss goodbye to the prospect of Black First Land First (BLF) stirring the pot in Parliament, with Andile Mngxitama’s party similarly struggling to reach five digits by the 70% counting mark.

The extent of BLF’s national support was always questionable, given that BLF’s protests and events never seemed to attract more than a handful of supporters. True to form, Mngxitama has already blamed everything but his leadership and policies for the party’s failure: White monopoly capital, his ban from Twitter, the biased media and the IEC…

I’ve saved the best for last – your man Hlaudi with his tail between his legs, especially when he was so lippy in the build-up:

By far the biggest loser of the 2019 polls, though, looks likely to be former SABC tzar Hlaudi Motsoeneng — at least if one balances his pre-election rhetoric with the stark facts of the election results.

Motsoeneng publicly termed himself “the best leader in South Africa”, and repeatedly declared himself “the future president of South Africa” at the helm of his African Content Movement party going into elections.

As late as election day itself, Motsoeneng was still telling the media that he was “confident of victory”.

With just shy of 11 million votes counted, Motsoeneng’s party was sitting on 0.02% of the vote.

In summary, shem.

And also, haha, you utterly incompetent wanker.

So yeah, that’s basically the state of play.

You can follow the election results live on News24’s tracker.

[sources:news24&timeslive&dailymav]