The Electoral Commission (IEC) in KwaZulu-Natal says it still has more than 83 000 home visits to conduct special voting in the province.
The Commission says it has processed just over half of the approved home visits.
Briefing the media at the provincial Results Operation Centre in Durban, IEC electoral officer Ntombifuthi Masinga said the progress remains a concern.
“Voting station visits are 2 per cent behind. We managed to process 65 817, which accounts for 49% of the voting station visits that we needed to do. We worry about home visits because that depends on our teams to reach all those voters that applied for special votes in the province, and by the end of business, we had only visited 51% of them, so we still have a total of 83 315 home visits specifically that we still need to visit today.”
Meanwhile, the IEC has requested additional police deployments at all its storage facilities across the province.
This follows an incident where members of a contesting political party stormed an IEC satellite storage facility in Marianhill, west of Durban.
Masinga says the group allegedly demanded the IEC to relocate the voting station, which has reportedly experienced repeated incidents of burglary and theft.
“The crowds kept building up, and our area managers could not move in and out of that facility, which affected two of our voting stations where the area managers still needed to go back and collect material because we had to get reinforcement from the SAPS side and needed to get POP (Public Order Policing unit) to disperse crowds. Order was restored eventually. SAPS have since augmented capacity in terms of the number of members posted at that facility, but over and above that, we have now requested that SAPS reinforce security at all of our storage facilities.”