[imagesource: EFE-EPA / Nic Bothma]

It’s still early days, with many more votes to be counted, but News24 predicts that the DA will retain control of Cape Town.

That means Geordin Hill-Lewis will become the next mayor of Cape Town, although it’s not all good news for the party.

In the last local government elections, which took place back in 2016, the DA scored 67% of the votes in the City of Cape Town.

This time around, it’s predicted to score 58%, although that is a figure subject to change as counting continues throughout the day.

The bad weather across the country would have contributed to low turnout numbers, but so too would the general apathy so many South Africans feel towards the names on the ballot sheet:

According to News24 elections analyst Dawie Scholtz the differential between traditional ANC voting areas and traditional DA voting districts is significant.

“The suburbs have turned out around 66% of the vote, while only 35% of people in townships voted. The poor weather makes it difficult for poorer people to go and cast their ballots,” he said from the IEC’s national results centre at the Tshwane Events Centre (Pretoria Showgrounds).

By the way, if you’re not familiar with Hill-Lewis, here he is talking last night ahead of the polling stations closing:

There are only 2 hours left for you to help secure Cape Town’s future! Make sure you are in the line before 9pm so that we can keep the ANC and EFF out and get more done than ever before for the people of Cape Town.#GHLforMayor #VoteDA pic.twitter.com/kORb7YCjVy

— Geordin Hill-Lewis (@geordinhl) November 1, 2021

For these elections, News24 has two pages running that are worth keeping an eye on.

The first shows the live election results, as official tallies come in from across the country. Check in on that here – as of 8AM, 18% of votes across the country had been tallied.

The second is News24’s elections forecaster 2021, which comes with this description:

News24’s results forecasts are based on a statistical analysis of votes counted to date and show what we expect the final result to be once all ballots are counted. The statistical model for these projections was developed exclusively for News24 by independent elections analyst Dawie Scholtz. Follow our forecasts as they evolve in real-time.

It’s that election forecaster which has predicted the DA to win 58% of the votes in Cape Town.

No other major cities had been forecast as of 8AM this morning:

The DA’s drop from 67% in 2016 to 58% (predicted) is largely a result of growth in support for the FF Plus, as well as the GOOD Party, which wasn’t on the ballot last time around.

Aside from the weather, the voting process itself wasn’t without a few snafus, reports Business Day:

The Western Cape also experienced problems with the voter management devices (VMD) used to check registered voters often going offline, slowing down the process. There were also cases of registered voters not being on the voters’ roll.

DA chairperson for the Western Cape Jaco Londt said VMD broke down regularly and went offline and it seemed that the IEC did not have enough people to process voters at the reception point with the result that processing took a lot longer than in the previous election.

At voting stations where longer delays occurred, and people were forced to queue outside in poor weather conditions, many would have thrown in the towel.

Ultimately, though, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that South Africans appear to have lost faith in the democratic process, with the lowest turnout since 1994 predicted.

[sources:news24&busday]