South African Elections ’09: There is only one story to be told · Global Voices
Ndesanjo Macha

Following the national and provincial elections on Wednesday in South Africa, grubstreet believes that there is only one story to be told: the election results and how the online media is responding.
In this post we are going to look at reactions from the web about the 2009 elections in South Africa starting with Hottest Gossip's facts about the election and the voting process:
TWO-TIER ELECTION
* Voters will be voting in national and provincial elections. Voting is under a proportional system where parties submit lists of candidates to fill 400 seats in the National Assembly, and for provincial parliaments in South Africa’s nine provinces.
* Parties will fill 200 of the National Assembly seats according to the national vote and another 200 seats in line with provincial support.
* Twenty-six parties will contest the election for the National Assembly and 11 parties will contest the ballot for the National Assembly and for all nine provincial legislatures.
* Parties have nominated 9,289 candidates for the national and provincial election, 61.6 percent of them male and 38.4 percent female.
2004 ELECTION RESULTS
* The ANC won 69.69 percent of the vote in the previous election held in 2004. The Democratic Alliance polled 12.37 percent of the vote, the Inkatha Freedom Party 6.97 percent and the United Democratic Movement 2.28 percent.
* Voter turnout in South African elections has been traditionally high. Turnout in 2004 was 76.73 percent.
VOTERS
* South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) says 23.18 million people are registered to vote.
* In the previous election in 2004, there were 20.67 million registered voters.
One thing you need to know from Grubstreet:
There’s only one story today: the election results and how the online media is responding. Everybody’s got the story that by 8.30am this morning, the ANC had 63.7% (2 078 352 votes) – with the largest total of votes coming from the Eastern Cape (503 730) — the DA 19.5% (636,637 votes) and Cope only 7.7% (251 200 votes).
Most of the parties’ Facebook pages are silent and the IEC’s website is not loading, possibly because of the the number of hits on it.
It’s hard to beat the immediacy of TV and radio on this one but News24 seems to have the best online package of the big online media houses, with a cool little map of SA showing the results as they come in (the Western Cape is going to the DA, the rest are sticking with the ANC). Click here to go there.
My favourite story of the past two days, however, goes to the Daily Dispatch, which ran a reader competition of people’s memories of the 1994 election. I actually got a lump in my thoa