S. Africans Start Counting Votes Round the Clock

All across this anxious nation, inside town halls, auditoriums and school lunchrooms, election officials Saturday began the tedious task of counting by hand the millions of paper ballots that will usher in South Africa’s first democratic government.

The process, which the African National Congress predicted will give it an “overwhelming victory,” started slowly in the nearly 900 counting centers. But by nightfall, the count of votes cast by an estimated 23 million South Africans in national and provincial elections was well under way in most areas.

Early returns, representing 8% of the vote, showed the ANC with 53% of the vote and current President Frederik W. de Klerk’s National Party with 34%. Those results were too early to be of much significance, though the election is expected to be won handily by Nelson Mandela’s ANC, with the National Party finishing a distant second.

The vote counting will continue around the clock until a final result is announced, perhaps by Monday, officials said.

South Africans on Saturday expressed their clear delight with the voting itself, which was surprisingly orderly and peaceful. But, as the returns came in, many began to worry about whether the losing parties will willingly abide by the results.

Still, the news was mostly good. International election observers, political leaders and the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) pronounced the voting free and fair. And police said the past week had marked one of the quietest in South African history, with even ordinary crime plummeting.

“Seldom in the annals of human history has such a fundamental transformation been accomplished in such a relatively peaceful manner,” said a statement issued by observers from the Commonwealth, the grouping of former British colonies that the new democratic South Africa is expected to quickly rejoin. “Despite organizational problems, the voting was a success and the people were able to participate freely.”

Counting at some centers Saturday was delayed for hours because of difficulties in reconciling the number of marked ballots with the number that had been distributed to polling stations.

But Johann Kriegler, chairman of the IEC and the man responsible for formally declaring the results free and fair, ordered his workers late Saturday to skip that cumbersome reconciliation process, if necessary, and “speed up the process.”

Kriegler said he was urging counting officers: “Don’t try the impossible. Get on with the count. People are entitled to know what the results are.”

The mood Saturday was upbeat at the Sandown Town Hall, near Johannesburg, where election officials under the watchful eye of party officers counted ballots from 12 polling stations in the white suburbs as well as the black township of Alexandra.

“There’s no panic here at all,” said Ron Mudge, one of the National Party’s agents. “Everyone is doing a good job, and all the parties are very friendly.”

A count of the first two polling stations in Alexandra, one of the thousands of places where blacks voted for the first time in their country’s history, gave the ANC more than 90% of the vote. Election officials said they were pleasantly surprised by the small number of ballots that had to be disqualified for being wrongly marked. And they credited the electoral commission’s voter education campaign.

“It’s been wonderful, tremendous,” said Willem Hefer, one of the ANC officers at the Sandown Town Hall. “We’re very pleased.”

But he added that the sheer size of the task, involving more than 50 counters working in 12-hour shifts, is daunting.

“I’ve worked on every white election since 1958, but those were absolute play-play compared to now,” Hefer said.

The counting process was peaceful across most of the nation, though hitches were reported in a few areas, primarily in rural regions where the three scheduled days of voting had been extended to a fourth day on Friday.

A brief pay strike by some IEC workers delayed vote counting in one office in the former Transkei homeland. The process also got off to a slow start in the Durban City Hall, where officials blamed disorganization.

Outside a large vote-counting center in Soweto, a fight broke out between political party representatives when a car filled with blank ballot papers showed up. But the brawl was broken up by police, and election officials blamed the incident on a misunderstanding.

South Africans closely followed the election returns on two TV channels of the state-owned national broadcasting company, which delivered results and commentary in English, Afrikaans and four African languages.

ANC campaign workers danced and celebrated at a downtown Johannesburg hotel. ANC Secretary General Cyril Ramaphosa predicted a sweeping victory.

“We are confident in our hearts that the people of this country have voted for the ANC in overwhelming numbers,” he said. “The ANC is poised to achieve overwhelming victory.”

De Klerk, surrounded by his supporters at the National Party offices, said he felt “buoyant.” And he welcomed some early returns that showed his party with strong support in the Western Cape province, where the National Party hopes to defeat the ANC.

Most of South Africa’s 3 million mixed-race Colored citizens live in that region, and their fear of a black-controlled government has made them an important support base for the National Party.

But the winner of the election will almost certainly be the ANC, making Mandela the new president and giving the party the opportunity to pick one of the new executive vice presidents. The only question is whether the ANC will achieve the 67% of parliamentary seats required to write and approve a new, permanent constitution.

The National Party will probably finish second, with enough votes to make De Klerk an executive vice president.

Although it was the National Party that brutally imposed apartheid in 1948, De Klerk, facing growing international isolation and an economic recession, began to reverse its system in 1990. The “new” National Party opened its membership rolls to all races and has courted voters who share its worries about the ANC and especially about members of the Communist Party in the ANC hierarchy.

The battle for third place is primarily among three of the 18 parties on the national ballot. One is Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party, which had demanded autonomy for the country’s Zulus, the nation’s largest ethnic group. The second is the Freedom Front, a splinter party of right-wing whites who want an autonomous white homeland. And the third is the radical black Pan-Africanist Congress.

Any party winning at least 5% of the vote will be able to claim a seat in the new president’s Cabinet. That provision in the interim constitution was originally designed to protect parties emerging from these elections with small though significant support.

De Klerk has said repeatedly that he will abide by the decision of the electorate. But other parties have expressed some reservations and complained about irregularities in the voting.

Buthelezi’s agreement a week before the elections to allow his Inkatha party to participate in the voting went some way toward heading off fears of a blood bath following the elections. Fighting between Inkatha and ANC supporters in Natal province has killed thousands in the past decade.

But on Saturday, Buthelezi expressed concern about the slow vote count in some regions of Natal, saying it raised concerns of “hanky-panky.” Although he said he will respect the results if the voting is declared free and fair, Buthelezi added that his supporters might become angry if they feel cheated.

If voting irregularities turn out to be widespread, he said, “there are going to be very serious problems.”

But Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, the man many credited with pressuring Inkatha into participating in the elections, issued a nationally televised appeal Saturday to Zulus and other South Africans to “turn their backs against violence.”

Zwelithini said the Zulu nation “still has a very long and hard road to travel. By voting, we have just taken the first step toward our destiny.”