While South Africans celebrated their 5th Democratic Elections by voting at the various polling stations, problems started to arise.
Gauteng, as one of the biggest populated provinces in the country, was not without fault as Ward 126 in Roodepoort had various issues which infuriated the local councillor Mike Tonkin.
Around 8:30am on 7 May approximately 240 people had voted at Weltevreden Park Primary and 370 at Boskop Primary. The low figure of voters at Weltevreden was because a Zip-Zip machine, that scans voters IDs, stopped working.
“I called the IEC official for the ward immediately. The voting process was extremely slow as some of the voters stood in the line between 3 to 4 hours.”
The queues started moving at a normal pace around 1pm after the Zip-Zip machine was sorted out.
According to the IEC website, 4952 people cast their votes at the station in Weltevreden Park compared to the 4624 at Boskop.
Tonkin explained that the voting station at Weltevreden Park was the biggest in Ward 126. “I was surprised by the number of people who voted at the various stations and that there was not any conflict between voters.”
Jackie Kobeni who voted at Weltevreden Park Primary said the people in the long queue were very calm and the atmosphere was amazing.
“It was inspirational to see so many different races in one place chatting to each other and making jokes about which party they were going to vote for.”
