Election results in hand, Electoral Commission moves to gazette councillors and launch new councils

The 2026 Local Government Elections results, announced on Sunday 8 November 2026, have set the Electoral Commission’s final delivery sequence in motion. Two practical outcomes now dominate its workload: publishing the final list of elected councillors in the Government Gazette and enabling the inaugural sittings of South Africa’s new municipal councils.

Writing on Thursday, the Commission confirmed that gazetting the names of councillors declared elected will, in turn, allow planning to begin for the first meetings of municipal councils. The statutory anchor is fixed. Under the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act, municipal managers must convene the first meeting of their councils within 14 days of councillors being declared elected.

Before any names can be published, two sets of processes must be settled.

The first concerns party candidate lists. On Monday 9 November 2026, the Commission issued written notice to parties that had won more seats than the proportional representation candidates they had nominated, giving them until Wednesday 11 November at 17h00 to supplement their lists. The window exists solely for parties to fill a shortfall, not to change lists or replace candidates. The Commission warned that a party which submitted fewer names than seats won and failed to supplement its list risks forfeiting seats if the shortfall makes it impossible for a municipal council to form a quorum.

The second set deals with candidates assigned to more than one seat. The Commission must notify parties when a candidate on their list could take up more than one seat, so the party can choose which one the candidate will occupy. The same rule applies to independent candidates who could be assigned to more than one ward seat. If a party or independent candidate fails to make that choice, the candidate’s name must be deleted from the list. Where the deleted name belongs to a ward candidate, the deletion triggers a by-election.

Meanwhile, certainty of outcomes has been addressed where vote counts were tied. Item 8 of the Municipal Structures Act provides that when two or more ward candidates receive an equal number of votes, the result is determined by lot. Four ward contests were settled this way in the recent elections: Ward 7 in Mnquma Municipality in the Eastern Cape, Ward 14 in Maluti A Phofung Municipality in the Free State, Ward 5 in Ba-Phalaborwa Municipality in Limpopo, and Ward 17 in Steve Tshwete Municipality in Mpumalanga.

Once these steps are complete, the final names of elected councillors will appear in the Government Gazette. Full details of the Commission’s outline of these steps were carried by the South African Government News Agency at https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/electoral-commission-outlines-key-steps-following-elections.

The scale of the delivery task is considerable. There are 10 526 seats available in the 2026 Local Government Elections: 8 825 local council seats, made up of 4 485 ward seats and 4 340 proportional representation seats, alongside 1 701 district council seats consisting of 707 directly elected and 994 indirectly elected councillors. Of the district seats, 707, or 40% of the total, have been filled through the district proportional representation ballot. The remaining 994 seats, or 60%, will only be filled when local councillors elect representatives from among themselves to serve on district councils, a process the Electoral Commission itself manages.

With the statutory clock running toward the 14-day deadline for inaugural council meetings, the Commission has urged elected representatives and political parties to follow the final processes closely and adhere to the prescribed deadlines so that the new municipal councils are constituted on time. Whether every council meets that deadline will depend on how quickly the remaining list supplements and seat assignments are resolved.