As mentioned, today we had elections in South Africa.  Election day is always a public holiday so as to allow everyone an opportunity to vote.  Naturally all the shops are also open so people can make the most of the public holiday and go shopping.  Some stores even had election day specials.  It’s good to know democracy and civic responsibility is so important to the businesses in South Africa (but seeing that more than half of them belong to Walmart by now…)

Anyway, the wife and I slept in (I returned from the coast with a bit of a cold, so I had to drag my carcass from bed in any case) before heading to the polls.  Our voting station thankfully had a short queue so my blocked sinuses didn’t have to spend hours standing in the late autumn sun.  Ten minutes after arriving we had both made our mark and had our thumbs marked in turn.

It is apparently illegal to take a photo of one’s ballot paper (or to take a selfie in the voting booth), but if you click here you’ll see a photo of the national ballot for today’s election with all twenty-nine parties that took part (and yes, we have a political party who calls themselves KISS.  They’ve actually been around since 1994.)  I have to confess I have never heard of more than half of them (I’ve known about KISS; have no idea what they stand for, though), and that in spite of doing quite a bit of reading over the past couple of months trying to figure out for whom to vote.

In the end, I voted for a party whose leader I trust.  They’re definitely not going to win the election, not on national or provincial level, but hopefully I have helped them to get at least one seat in parliament.

Now the wait for the results starts.  We all know who’s going to win, the only question is how far (and whether our president will manage to hang on until the end of his second term, but let’s not go into that…)