ANC voting going ahead after long delay
2012-12-17 22:02
Ranjeni Munusamy, NewsFire and Sapa
Mangaung - Results of the elections for the ANC top six positions will only be announced on Tuesday morning.
Delegates at the ANC' s 53rd national conference are expected to start voting on Monday night, but no plenary is scheduled until the next morning, meaning that the electoral commission is not expected to announce the results before then.
The conference has now broken into commissions. There was confusion among delegates about whether the disputed Free State and North West delegations would vote on separate ballots, as proposed by the electoral commission.
Despite objections in the plenary to the proposal, which is a cautionary measure to stop all the election results being invalidated by the courts, the electoral commission decided to go ahead with different coloured ballot papers for the two provinces.
After objections were raised in the plenary to the announcement of separate ballots, electoral chairperson Mochubela Seekoe apparently acknowledged them and walked off stage, leaving delegates in doubt as to whether there would in fact be separate ballots.
Voting was delayed late into Monday night as the ballots were being printed, and is expected to continue into the early hours of the morning.
By 22:00 voting had not yet started, an election official told Sapa.
It was not clear when voting would begin. The election commission was still in a meeting, he said.
People wandered around the University of the Free State, where the conference was being held, looking for their commission rooms.
The Elexions Agency had set up voting booths in one of the halls on campus. The area was marked with banners.
A sign was posted outside saying "silence, voting in progress".
Delegates making their way to the voting station were asked to leave and go to their commissions.
Some were sleeping on patches of grass outside.
Electoral commission member Andrew Mlangeni told delegates that each commission would be taken to the station to cast their vote. The votes would be counted manually.
