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LAST UPDATED - 09:00 (GMT +2) - FINAL RESULTS



Good Morning eSouth Africa

It's a beautiful sunny 20°C day down here in Cape Town, South Africa and the smell of fresh morning air has made its way into my office - what an appropriate day it is for the re-birth of eSouth Africa. It is of course congressional elections today which started at 09:00 our time and end at 08:59:59 tomorrow morning. We've got the whole day and night ahead of us to vote so don't rush into things; in fact, it's better you leave it later as your vote may then be cast towards one of our candidates who is short of votes for a seat.

If you've been away or out of the loop from the eSouth African media, the following articles need to be voted up and read carefully:
- http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/esa-president-official-congressional-release-909124/1/20
- http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/secure-congress-against-ajay-s-pto-group-edit-ajay-bruno-sells-out-the-cda--909231/1/20
- http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/the-ministry-of-information-vote-smart-vote-for-the-future-of-esouth-africa-907325/1/20

These articles give a brief overview of who to vote for and the challenges we face from opposing PTO forces.

If you didn't catch our official election tracker website, the address is http://tklabs.tv/erepublik/elections/20090825-congressionals/. This website will be updated throughout the day by the president's officials and will contain a list of approved candidates who are in need of votes. The reason is simple; we can't all vote for 1 of the candidates as only he/she will get a seat. We therefore need to split our votes among all the candidates to ensure everyone gets a seat, and in doing so, we need to vote for the candidate who has the least votes.

The elections have started off slowly, but that's to be expected this early in the day since the more experienced players are holding off their votes and the 2-clickers are yet to pop by. We can expect a surge in vote come this afternoon our time as well as when our ally and supportive nations awake to send troops of voters.

11:11 (GMT +2)

It's still very early in the day so not much can be said about the numbers.

All with the exception of 2 candidates are sitting in the top 10, however all numbers are pretty tight and theres a marginal difference between positions.

13:11 (GMT +2)

We're currently looking pretty good with all our candidates sitting either in the top 10 or just outside the top 10. There's still a long way to go so think of this as a marathon, not a short distance sprint 🙂

15:11 (GMT +2)

In the last 2 hours, we've seen another 32 votes cast of which 24 have been cast towards endorsed candidates and 8 towards non-endorsed candidates.

We currently hold 80.02% of the votes with the remaining 19.98% sitting with non-endorsed candidates. It's also interesting to note that 8 (47.06😵 out of the 17 non-endorsed candidates still haven't received a vote whilst 4 (23.53😵 have only 1 vote and the remaining 5 (29.41😵 2 to 6 votes. It would seem that they haven't planned their spread of votes strategically as there's clearly an imbalance of votes cast for non-endorsed candidates.

All our candidates are proudly taking the top 10 positions and seem to be walking away with it at this point.

PTO or FAIL?

17:11 (GMT +2)

This has been the biggest jump in votes pro the non-endorsed candidates so far with 32 new votes being cast towards our candidates and 11 towards non-endorsed candidates. We've lost a small percentage of the total votes from 80.02% to 78.48% (1.54%, hardly a train smash), but this is expected to happen as the day moves on. We still hold a whopping 124 votes, Deniz Khazari (South African Gold Party) 9 and the PTO challengers a mere 25 out of 158.

We're losing a bit of our spread with too many votes being given to our top 3 candidates as opposed to our bottom 4 who need them to retain their positions in the top 10. Deniz Khazari is currently sitting at 11th and is just short of 2 votes whilst Ajay Bruno is sitting at 12th with 8 votes, just short of 3 votes. If we're to judge by the spread of votes given to the non-endorsed candidates, it would seem that Deniz Khazari, Ajay Bruno & Dutch Marley are the current favourites to challenge our endorsed candidates. It should be noted that Deniz Khazari is a member of the South African Gold Party and has chosen to run without the endorsement of our president, Ines Schumacher. The rest of the challengers are sitting with just a couple votes and don't appear to be too much of a threat in the short run.

We can expect to see quite a large jump in votes over the next few hours as our friends from the eUS (12:05 PM) and eBrazil (01:05 PM) come to the party. We're expecting assistance from a few other countries however it still very early in the morning in these places.

19:11 (GMT +2)

37 votes were cast in the last 2 hours of which 27 went to endorsed candidates, 3 to Deniz Khazari and 7 to Ajay Bruno and his crew. The PTO candidates each gained an average of 0.438 votes during this period (less than 1 vote each), whilst the endorsed candidates gained an average of 2.7 votes each.

The total stake holding in votes now sits at 77.44% for endorsed candidates, 6.15% for Deniz Khazari and 15.9% for the PTO group. If one wants to look at the spread of votes for the PTO group, 13 (81.25😵 out of 16 hold less than 4 votes and out of those 13, 5 (38.46😵 hold 1 vote each and the remaining 6 (46.15😵 still have 0 votes.

The endorsed candidates are still sitting pretty well however the lower half have approx 12 - 14 votes each, just 2 - 4 votes ahead of the closest competition, Deniz Khazari (South African Gold Party), who is himself leading Ajay Bruno by 2 votes. Deniz Khazari, who is running as a non-endorsed candidate and a non-PTO threat, has more votes than any PTO candidate and more than 87.5% of the PTO candidates combined.

21:11 (GMT +2)

We're now half-way through election day and things are looking bright for true eSouth African patriots. In the last 12 hours, 240 votes have been cast with 45 votes being cast in the last 2 hours. The endorsed candidates are gaining an average of 15.5 votes an hour whilst the PTO group is gaining just 3 votes an hour. This may be skewed since the PTO group could fly in a lot more citizens in the weee hours of the morning in a rush for last minute votes. A large percentage of South African players will be sleeping for the last 12 hours of voting, and it is therefore vital that we gain some good ground before night time, or at least keep watchmen throughout the night who are on stand-by to call our allies for backup. Mr Ajay Bruno's party comprises mostly of American players, who will have an advantage given their timezone, and German players, who are at the same disadvantage of South Africans. If Ajay Bruno can gather a horde of supporters to vote for him, which he claims he can, there's a small chance he can take a top 10 position during the night. I do however have a feeling that he's lost a large group of supporters, the Germans in particular. They should have voted for him by now since it's getting quite late in Germany, unless of course they're planning to pull an all nighter or set their alarm clocks for an early wake up.

At this point, I'm actually more worried about Deniz Khazari, who's managed to pull himself into the top 10 at position 6. He's currently sitting with 18 votes, ahead of Alby, Black8Shadow, Mark Morcom and Lucien Morjuet with 17, 16, 16 and 15 votes respectively. He's managed to push Jan Olivier down out of the top 10 to position 11, just ahead of Ajay Bruno who's still on 10 votes. On a brighter note, Ajay Bruno hasn't gained a single vote in the last 4 hours and he's currently only averaging 0.83 votes an hour, which leads me to think that he's either severly lacking the numbers he thought he had, or planning a mass vote later in the night - calm before the storm perhaps?

23:11 (GMT +2)

We're still looking strong with the majority of our candidates sitting in the top 10 and only a few shifting between the top 10, 11 and 12 positions. With the help of ally forces, we should be able to fight off this PTO relatively easier - so rest assured that we're in safe hands here.

...tomorrow, we shall wake up as patriotic eSouth African citizens in a new homeland!

I'm signing off for the night and will be not be posting any further updates until the final results are out at 09:00 GMT+2 tomorrow morning. I leave you in the hands of Christopher Kirkland who is running a commentary @ http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/the-southern-times-election-coverage-910187/1/20

08:30 (GMT +2)

With just 30 minutes to go, both Ajay Bruno from the PTO group and Deniz Khazari who is running as a non-endorsed candidate have managed to squeeze their way into the top 10. Deniz Khazari is currently sitting at position 1 with 38 votes and seems to have secured a seat in cabinet. Ajay Bruno is sitting in position 8 with 29 votes ahead of both Jan Olivier and Steven Bosch in positions 9 and 10 respectively. This also means that Mark Morcom and Lucien Morjuet have been pushed out of the top 10 and are sitting just outside with 25 and 24 votes. At this point, it's unlikely that both will win seats unless both Ajay Bruno and Deniz Khazari can both be pushed out. We can only hope for a last minute rush of votes which will boost one of these congressman to a top 10 seat. It's a bitter-sweet morning for us as Ajay looks likely to secure a seat, however he's the only one in his party to have gathered any votes, with the next highest PTO member receiving just 7 votes, a huge 19 votes short of the top 10.

09:00 (GMT +2)

The final results are now in and it's not completely what we expected. Deniz Khazari, who ran as a non-endorsed candidate opposing the golden 10, has secured the number 1 seat in cabinet with 39 votes (9.58😵, just 6 ahead of our most voted endorsed candidate ERDWURM. Ajay Bruno has also infiltrated the top 10 and secured 8th position with 30 votes, tieing with Black8Shadow, Alby, Zagarius and Enoch Root. We managed to secure just 8 out of 10 seats for the top 10 forcing Jan Olivier and Lucien Morjuet out of the race into positions 11 and 12 respectively. At the end of the day, we would've pushed Ajay Bruno out of the race by securing just 5 more votes, 5! Deniz Khazari isn't too big a concern as he's pledged his support towards our president and has agreed to help vote in the approved proposals. It is a bit unfortunate that he chose a time like this to run for cabinet both against our president's words and at the risk of losing eSouth Africa to a PTO group, but nontheless - congrats.

It's a bitter sweet morning today (cloud cover, 17°C) but we can't say we didn't learn much from these elections:
- eSouthAfrica has a wonderful group of allies and friends who are willing to support us when needed
- Ajay Bruno isn't the threat we all thought he was
- Ajay Bruno has failed to yield a return for his investors and his party holds only 1 seat in cabinet, enough to change squat.
- We as a nation are a lot stronger and these elections saw the coming together of many eSouth African parties, regardless of their personal views and vendettas against one another.

I'd like to end off by thanking all eSouth Africans, allies and friends of eSouth Africa and foes of Ajay Bruno for coming to the party and helping us avoid a PTO threat.


(click for enlarged results)

I am also tracking voting movements throughout the day for all candidates and this graph will be updated on a bi-hourly basis.
*edit*
I was unable to track the last 12 hours but you can still see how the PTO group scurried to get votes in the 2nd half of the election.


(click for enlarged graph)


I wish all endorsed candidates the best of luck, and remember eSouth Africa...

VOTE SMART!



If you're looking for a running commentary on the eSouth African elections, check out Christopher Kirkland's paper 'The Southern Times' at http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/the-southern-times-election-coverage-910187/1/20