Members of Parliament - 66 or 67?

Votes determine the seats allocated to members of parliament.  Why should the ANC essentially get the extra 1 seat that the spoilt votes created?

Latest Results - 11:21AM

As at 11:21:47AM  the number of votes counted were 13,983,305.00 

Of these 193,302.00 have been counted as SPOILED VOTES

The results are as follows:

ANC 9,245,512.00 66.12% (with spoilt incl.) 67.05% (with spoilt excl.)

DA 2,136,935.00 15.28% (with spoilt incl.) 15.50% (with spoilt excl.)

COPE 1,040,841.00 7.44% (with spoilt incl.) 7.55% (with spoilt excl.)

IFP 593,504.00 4.24% (with spoilt incl.) 4.30% (with spoilt excl.)

ID 123,807.00 0.89% (with spoilt incl.) 0.90% (with spoilt excl.)

UDM 127,970.00 0.92% (with spoilt incl.) 0.93% (with spoilt excl.)

BOTTOM LINE: if one includes the spoilt votes (like the UK does) then the ANC does not yet have the 2/3rd majority.

66.12 is close but it is NOT 2/3rd's

Spoiled Votes

What exactly is a spoilt vote?

Wikipedia describes a spoined vote as one of the following:

Ways of spoiling a ballot include:

• leaving the ballot blank (though some ballots include an explicit "none of the above" option)
• completing the ballot in an illogical or unapproved manner, such as:
  • casting more than the permitted number of votes, for example, more than one vote in a plurality voting system, an overvote.
  • casting fewer than the permitted number of votes, for example, casting only 2 votes in a vote-for-three race, an undervote.
  • filling a preference ballot out of sequence, e.g. 1-2-2-3-4 or 1-2-4-5-6, or marking such a ballot with an "X" where that is not permitted.
• filling the ballot in a manner which is illegible or incomprehensible.
• physically deforming ballots, especially those counted by machine.
• writing on the ballot, other than the minimal marks necessary to complete it, may be regarded as compromising the secrecy of the ballot due to the possibility of handwriting analysisestablishing the voter's identity.

Spoilt votes may be the result of a deliberate act by the voter;

The validity of the election may be questioned if there is an unusually high proportion of spoilt votes, however, in countries such as the UK where a spoilt ballot paper counts towards the voter turnout, some voters will deliberately spoil their ballot paper to show disapproval of the candidates available whilst still taking part in the electoral process. In theory, a UK election could have a 100% turnout with no votes cast for any of the candidates if every registered voter were to spoil their paper, although this is highly improbable.

If the IEC does not include the spoilt votes in the count then this could make a HUGE difference into whether the ANC gets a 2/3rd's majority.

The average length of time that people stood in the queues to vote was well over 2 hours for most people.  Surely their votes should count?  Even a spoiled vote should count as a vote!

SA Elections

I've been tracking the counts for the South African elections for over 24 hours now.  

These have then been posted on my twitter and facebook profile and some of them even made their way onto the News24 website.

Most of my posts have been about the national results as well as the results for the Western Cape.

The statistics were retrieved from the IEC website and then transferred to a spreadsheet on google docs.  I had a specially created field in the spreadsheet that would allow me to easily post the result on twitter

I love numbers and analysis, which why I probably love my job (systems and web analyst), and so this process of tracking has been quite fun.  My family and friends have started coming up with weird nicknames for me though.... like 'elections nerd' and making comments about my status on facebook (stats, stats and stats).

I'm incredibly excited and proud to be a part of this whole experience....!