South Africa's Smaller Political Parties Concede Defeat
South Africa’s smaller opposition political parties resolved to accept the 8 May election final results that were announced by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).
The 27 parties had earlier expressed concern over a number of irregularities witnessed during voting, the major issue is that of multiple voting.
However, speaking to the media after a party liaison committee meeting held by the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) and the Statistician-General on Saturday, the unofficial spokesperson of the smaller parties, Mzwanele Manyi, said:
The 27-odd parties concede and accept the results.
We were suitably briefed by the Statistician-General and accept that although there is a margin of 0.1% likelihood that there might be contaminated votes, that isn’t enough to hold the IEC to ransom.
We accept the final results after the briefing by the Statistician-General on the independent audit process in which he revealed that from the 1 020 samples, there was a margin of error of less than a percentage hence it is not enough to influence the outcome seriously.
The 27 smaller political parties include Manyi’s African Transformation Movement (ATM), Mosiuoa Lekota’s Congress of the People (COPE) Hlaudi Motsoeneng’s African Content Movement (ACM) and the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PACA).
