The Provincial Commissioner of the South African Police Service in the Free State, Simon Mpembe, revealed that the province doesn’t have any high-risk voting stations.

Mpembe explained that the three hot spots that were initially identified leading to the 2016 municipal elections, have been mitigated.

Speaking to OFM News at the IEC’s Results Operations Centre today (Tuesday) in Bloemfontein, Mpembe alluded that they started with operations, two weeks ago.

“We decided that we should rather go to those stations and hold hard operations. That was specifically at the side of Zamdela, Mangaung and Botshabelo. In terms of the hard operations, we have been conducting them for the past two weeks and have also mitigated those risks. So we can safely say that for these past two weeks we don’t have high-risk stations. We are having medium-risk. They all categorised in terms of low-risk, medium-risk and high risk stations. So we don’t have any high risk stations in the Free State province.”

Mpembe explained that Zamdela, Botshabelo and Bloemfontein have been calm since yesterday (Monday) when special votes started.

Refilwe Gaeswe/Courant News