South Africa votes: a record 29.2 million registered, 1.4 million special votes and 21 police cases so far

South Africans are voting today, Wednesday, November 4, in local government elections that will decide who runs the country's 257 municipalities for the next five years. Voting stations opened at 7 a.m. and close at 9 p.m. local time, and the day is a public holiday. The Electoral Commission (IEC) says 29.2 million people are registered, the most in the country's history, with 23,696 voting stations and about 188,000 officials deployed, according to its statement on the eve of the vote. A further 1,425,942 people voted early on Monday and Tuesday. Final results are expected on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported.

This is the first municipal vote since the African National Congress (ANC) lost its national majority in 2024 and formed a coalition government with the Democratic Alliance (DA) and others. It is also the first local election contested by former President Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party. Our pre-election report set out the polls, the parties' closing arguments and the funding disclosures. This story covers election day itself: the official numbers, the security picture, what the leaders said as they voted, the dispute over migration that shaped the final week, and what happens after the count. Representative polling is reported where it exists; online reaction is reported as a limited selection.

The numbers on the day

The IEC's special-vote figures give the first hard data of this election. Of roughly 2.6 million approved special voters, 1,425,942 cast ballots over the two days, about 55 percent. Of those, 974,852 voted at stations and 451,090 through home visits. Gauteng led with 264,898, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with 208,846 and the Eastern Cape with 207,258, per the IEC. The commission called the figures preliminary. Special ballots are stored and counted with election-day ballots after stations close, so they will not appear as a separate early result.

Gauteng

264,898

KwaZulu-Natal

208,846

Eastern Cape

207,258

Limpopo

180,627

Mpumalanga

149,714

Western Cape

148,493

North West

126,187

Free State

75,946

Northern Cape

63,973

Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa

Show the numbers

Province	Special votes
Gauteng	264,898
KwaZulu-Natal	208,846
Eastern Cape	207,258
Limpopo	180,627
Mpumalanga	149,714
Western Cape	148,493
North West	126,187
Free State	75,946
Northern Cape	63,973

Voters are electing councils for 8 metropolitan municipalities, 44 district municipalities and 205 local municipalities, with 136,790 candidates competing for 10,526 seats, the government news agency reported. Each voter in a metro casts two ballots, one for a ward council member and one for a party list; voters in district areas cast a third. Councils then elect mayors. Voters must show a smart ID card, a green barcoded ID book or a temporary identity certificate, and may vote only at the station where they are registered.

Turnout is the open question. Only 46 percent of registered voters took part in the 2021 municipal elections, Al Jazeera noted. An eNCA/MarkData poll released October 25 predicted 48.8 percent this time, the Daily Maverick reported. We could not open that poll's methodology, so we report its figure as the Daily Maverick described it. President Cyril Ramaphosa, voting at Hyde Park High School in Johannesburg on Wednesday morning, said he had noticed an apparently large turnout at stations and called the election "historic," Eyewitness News reported. That is an impression from one station, not a count.

Security and conduct

Police recorded 21 election-related cases between Sunday and Wednesday morning, and KwaZulu-Natal has 165 voting stations classed as high risk, the most of any province, Al Jazeera reported. The National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure said police and soldiers were on standby and that attempts to disrupt voting "will not be tolerated," per AllAfrica's summary of the government briefing. Ramaphosa had earlier authorized 510 soldiers to support police in KwaZulu-Natal until November 30, the Rio Times reported. The deployment followed anti-migrant protests in Durban in October in which vehicles were burned.

The campaign's final weeks were marked by political killings, which our earlier report covered, including the killing of an MK organizer and a police count of 20 political murders. On Tuesday, TimesLIVE's headlines reported 34 misinformation complaints lodged with the IEC and the dismissal of a KwaZulu-Natal election officer for using a party-branded car to carry sensitive material, in items linked from its special-votes report. We could not open those articles and report only the headlines. IEC chairperson Mosotho Moepya said the commission "is fully prepared for election day," by the same report.

What the leaders said

Ramaphosa used his weekly newsletter to concede the ground on which the opposition is fighting. "Municipal failures have contributed to declining public trust and confidence in democratic governance," he wrote, per Al Jazeera. On Wednesday he acknowledged that the ANC-led Johannesburg government has not been effective, but said he was confident voters would still back the party, Eyewitness News reported. That is a notable admission from a sitting president about his own party's largest city. Johannesburg has had five mayors in four years, and the National Treasury withheld about R8 billion in transfers from the city over financial mismanagement, according to the Wikipedia summary of the campaign, which cites local reporting. We did not open the Treasury's own notice and report the figure as secondary.

The DA's Johannesburg mayoral candidate, former party leader Helen Zille, 75, told the Associated Press that the ANC is in "free fall," Al Jazeera reported. Her campaign included snorkeling in a mud-filled trench left by a burst municipal water pipe, a stunt aimed at the city's water failures. Zuma told MK supporters in Durban: "We are going to start by taking back our country here." The ANC, DA, EFF, MK and Inkatha Freedom Party closing rallies are covered in our earlier report.

Sources: The National and Sunday Tribune on the October release; Ipsos on the September 4 release. Both are from Ipsos's Khayabus "Pulse of the People" study of 3,600 adults interviewed in their homes, with voting questions put to registered voters on an electronic ballot. Ipsos gives metro margins of error of plus or minus 5.6 points for Johannesburg, 7.9 for Tshwane, 6.9 for eThekwini and 6.1 for Cape Town at 95 percent confidence, and warns that the figures are not predictions.

The two Ipsos rounds show MK's eThekwini figure falling from 55 to 47 percent between mid-year and October, while the DA's Cape Town figure rose from 46 to 51 percent. Both changes are larger than the stated margins, but the earlier round's fieldwork coincided with no comparable event, and the later round overlapped with Zuma's 11-day hospital stay, which Ipsos said may have affected answers. Nationally the October round had the ANC at 30 percent and the DA at 28, with MK at 12 and the EFF at 10, among the 2,533 registered voters who chose a party. Ipsos said the findings "should not be interpreted as predictions of the final election results." The SRF/Victory Research telephone poll reported in our earlier story put the ANC at 32 and the DA at 26. Neither poll gives any party a majority nationally or in Johannesburg or Tshwane.

The migration dispute in the final week

The sharpest argument of the closing days was over migration, and it ran inside the parties as much as between them. On the eve of the vote, Zuma met leaders of March and March, a movement led by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma that campaigns for undocumented migrants to leave South Africa. The MK party said afterward that it acknowledges the movement's campaign but rejects xenophobia, and that enforcing immigration law "must never become an excuse for xenophobia, discrimination or violence." It also said undocumented foreign nationals must regularize their stay or "return to their countries of origin through lawful processes," the Rio Times reported from the party's statement. We could not open the MK statement directly.

That position has three readings, and the evidence supports elements of each. Supporters of stricter enforcement argue that the law already requires documentation and that councils cannot plan services without knowing who lives in them. Critics argue that a meeting with an anti-migrant movement on election eve, in a city that saw vehicles burned in October, lends legitimacy to intimidation whatever the accompanying disclaimer. A third view, voiced by the EFF, holds that the migration debate distracts from corruption and tender fraud as the cause of failing services; the Daily Maverick noted the EFF's Pan-Africanist stance on immigration is a vulnerability for it in KwaZulu-Natal. The MK statement itself contains no logical error; the dispute is over what the meeting signals, which is a question of inference about intent that the statement cannot settle.

What happens after the count

Results will be released station by station as counting finishes, with final results expected Sunday. Under the Municipal Structures Act, each council must hold its first meeting within 14 days of the result being declared, and that meeting elects the mayor, speaker and, in some councils, the executive. Where no party has a majority, that deadline forces coalition talks within two weeks. As of February, 74 of 257 municipalities were run by coalitions or minority administrations, according to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, Al Jazeera reported. Ipsos analyst Mari Harris said that if its figures hold, most metros will need coalitions, and that "two weeks of intense speculation and uncertainty are likely to follow."

The DA has ruled out coalitions with MK and the EFF, which leaves it looking to ActionSA, the Patriotic Alliance, the Freedom Front Plus and the IFP in Johannesburg and Tshwane, the Daily Maverick reported. The PA's willingness to work with the ANC gives it leverage. In eThekwini, only two of four scenarios the Daily Maverick modeled allow a coalition without MK. The results will also shape the contest to succeed Ramaphosa as ANC leader at the party's December 2027 conference, Al Jazeera noted.

The vote comes as South Africa's relations with Washington are at a low point. The United States will drop South Africa from the AGOA trade preference program on January 1, as we reported, and Ramaphosa's government was among those abroad reading the Democratic midterm win on Tuesday for signs of change, covered in our world-reactions report. None of that is on the ballot, but the DA and ANC have argued over who is to blame for the rupture.

What people are saying online

Our usual method is to read r/worldnews and other Reddit listings and X's trending pages, then open posts. During this run every Reddit listing was blocked from our research desk, and our tool for opening individual X posts failed on every attempt. What follows is a handful of posts surfaced by web search, with permalinks. We could not open them to confirm wording or engagement, so we quote only what the search index showed and report no like or repost counts. Most are from institutions and politicians, which is a limit: we found few posts from ordinary South African voters this morning, and we do not claim these reflect public sentiment.

Reuters' account posted that "South Africans vote in municipal elections on November 4, with anger over corruption, crime and failing public services threatening to deal another blow to the African National Congress" (permalink). Nasiphi Moya, the ActionSA mayor of Tshwane, posted on Wednesday morning: "Good morning, Tshwane. Voting stations are open! Let's go vote for ActionSA" with the hashtag #FiveMoreYears (permalink). The IEC's account urged voters to "make your voice count" and encourage family and neighbors to vote (permalink). The Cape Times reported that DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis "is targeting an outright majority in Cape Town" despite polls suggesting a tighter race (permalink).

No representative poll of election-day sentiment exists yet. The Ipsos figures above, and an Ipsos finding reported by the Daily Maverick that 47 percent of respondents said no party represents their views, are the best available measures of mood, and both predate the vote.

What remains unknown

Turnout, which will not be known until stations close. Whether the ANC finishes ahead of the DA nationally, as both pre-election polls suggested by small margins. Whether MK wins eThekwini outright. Which coalitions form in Johannesburg and Tshwane within the 14-day window. And whether the security incidents recorded so far stay isolated. We will report the first results as the IEC releases them.

Differing perspectives

Who should govern South Africa's big metros if, as polls suggest, no party wins a majority?

Each position is summarized as its supporters make it, with equal weight and in alphabetical order. A summary is not an endorsement; the evidence for each is weighed in the story above.

• DA-led councils that exclude MK and the EFF

  Who holds it: The Democratic Alliance, its leader Geordin Hill-Lewis and its Johannesburg candidate Helen Zille

  The DA argues that the ANC is in what Zille called "free fall" and that its councils have delivered burst pipes, five Johannesburg mayors in four years and withheld Treasury transfers. It says the fastest route to working water, roads and power is a DA-led administration with a record, as in Cape Town, and that it will not share power with MK or the EFF, whom it blames for unstable coalitions since 2021. It is seeking outright majorities where it can and partnerships with ActionSA, the IFP, the Freedom Front Plus or the Patriotic Alliance where it cannot.

  In their words: Al Jazeera, reporting Zille's remarks to the Associated Press, Nov. 4, 2026 ↗

• MK-led government starting in KwaZulu-Natal

  Who holds it: The uMkhonto weSizwe party and former President Jacob Zuma

  MK argues that the ANC betrayed its voters by governing with the DA, and that the party should "start by taking back our country" in KwaZulu-Natal, where polls put it far ahead in eThekwini. It says councils must enforce immigration law so that undocumented foreign nationals regularize their stay or leave through lawful processes, while insisting that enforcement must never become an excuse for xenophobia, discrimination or violence. It presents itself as the party that will act on land, jobs, border security and public services where the coalition government has not.

  In their words: Rio Times, reporting the MK Party statement on Zuma's election-eve meeting, Nov. 4, 2026 ↗

• Return ANC-led councils with a mandate to fix delivery

  Who holds it: The African National Congress and President Cyril Ramaphosa

  Ramaphosa acknowledges that municipal failures have eroded public trust and that the ANC-led Johannesburg government has not been effective, but argues that voters should still back the party because it has a plan and the national government's resources behind it. He points to the coalition government's service-delivery fund for water and electricity in the metros, says the ANC learns from what it has done wrong as well as what it has done well, and frames the local vote as a tool for voters to enforce the change they want within the governing party rather than outside it.

  In their words: Eyewitness News, reporting Ramaphosa's remarks after voting, Nov. 4, 2026 ↗

• Vote out the ANC but reject privatization

  Who holds it: The Economic Freedom Fighters and its leader Julius Malema

  The EFF argues that voters should remove the ANC from councils because it has failed to provide jobs, proper roads, water and reliable electricity, and that only the EFF offers meaningful change. It says the collapse of municipalities is driven by corruption and tender fraud, not by a shortage of private management, and that the DA's answer amounts to privatizing water, electricity and sanitation so that residents buy them like data. On this view the choice is not between the ANC and the DA but between both of them and a party that would keep services public.

  In their words: MDN News, video post on X of Malema's remarks in Venda, 2026 ↗