At the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s Results Operations Centre in Midrand, the machinery for capturing and verifying the country’s local election results is running its course, and government is asking the public to let it finish the job. Speaking to SAnews at the facility on Friday, Government Deputy Spokesperson William Baloyi renewed a warning aimed at South Africans and political parties alike: spreading misinformation and disinformation about the 2026 Local Government Elections undermines the integrity of the process, and it will not be tolerated.
The operational message at the heart of Baloyi’s remarks is a simple one. The IEC remains the only legitimate authority mandated to announce election results, and the public should allow the results-capturing and verification processes to unfold without interference. Circulating unverified results, he warned, or sharing unauthorised photographs of marked ballot papers, disrupts that work and can mislead the public ahead of official announcements.
“The IEC is the legitimate structure that can pronounce all the results, and we want people to respect that,” Baloyi said.
He was explicit that the consequences are not merely reputational. “We want to appeal that misinformation and disinformation are criminal acts. The South African Police Service has already indicated the number of people who have been arrested for misinformation and disinformation,” he told SAnews. As an example of conduct that contravenes electoral rules, he pointed to the taking and sharing of photographs of oneself with a marked ballot paper, a practice he described as a violation of the rules governing the process.
Baloyi also turned to the political parties and independent candidates themselves, urging them to route any complaints or objections through the appropriate IEC mechanisms rather than issuing statements that might create unnecessary tension. In his framing, the channels for dispute resolution already exist. The task for stakeholders is to use them. He went further, calling on all stakeholders to respect the outcome once results are finalised, and to accept the result as a reflection of the will of voters.
Beyond the results process, Baloyi offered an assessment of how election day itself was delivered. He commended South Africans, and young people in particular, for participating in the elections, describing the turnout as an important milestone in the country’s democratic development. While the IEC will provide the official voter turnout figures, he welcomed reports of increased youth participation and added that more young people should be encouraged to take part in democratic processes.
He also credited the security services and other stakeholders for their role in ensuring that the elections were generally incident-free, despite isolated challenges. That distinction, between a broadly smooth operation and a handful of localised difficulties, framed his account of the day: the system worked, with exceptions worth noting but not enough to alter the overall picture.
Meanwhile, Baloyi widened the lens from election day to what follows it. Local government elections matter, he argued, because municipalities are the sphere of government closest to communities and directly responsible for services that affect people’s daily lives. Voting, he emphasised, is only one part of the democratic process. Citizens should continue to hold elected representatives accountable by attending public meetings and following up on service delivery commitments, the practical work that determines whether promises made during a campaign translate into functioning services on the ground.
“South Africa has once again demonstrated that it was a living democracy,” Baloyi said.
Taken together, his remarks sketch a delivery-focused picture of the election: a results operation that must be allowed to complete its verification work, official channels that exist for grievances, security arrangements that largely held, and a democratic process whose real test, in his view, begins only after the ballots are counted. Whether the verification now under way in Midrand concludes without further disruption may depend on how far the public heeds that appeal.