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Cope MP says she ‘proved’ she could have voted five times in one hour

───   11:43 Thu, 09 May 2019

Cope MP says she ‘proved’ she could have voted five times in one hour | News Article

The ‘indelible ink’ issue has never before plagued an SA election as it has this time around.


In televised interviews and in her official response to observing the 2019 national and provincial elections, Congress of the People (Cope) MP Deidre Carter has claimed it was surprisingly and shockingly easy to potentially cast more than one ballot in this year’s polls.

The issue has seen several parties, including the DA, lodging official complaints with the Independent Electoral Commission of SA (IEC).

Carter says that after she became aware of how easily the IEC’s “indelible ink” came off her thumb (unlike in previous elections), she proceeded to another voting station in Cape Town to see if she could get as far as being given another ballot paper to vote.

At different stations, she could repeatedly be given more printed slips from the IEC’s scanners, since they are not linked to any central live database, and she went to as many as five stations in total. She showed reporters each of the slips she had collected along the way.

Carter claims she was able to do all of this within the space of an hour from around 5pm on Wednesday.


At the point she was about to fill in the form required for those voting away from their registered station, she alerted the presiding officer to what was going on. She made it clear that she never, in fact, committed the criminal act of voting more than once at more than one voting station.

The Cope MP, who is also her party’s Western Cape premier candidate, told journalists she had done all of this because she had been alerted to allegations that a group of EFF voters had been “high-fiving” each other earlier in the day for allegedly successfully voting more than once. The EFF has, in turn, made allegations against the ANC over the same issue in, particularly, North West.


The Citizen

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