Spotlight: EskomSePush turns its load-shedding app into a ward-level tracker for tomorrow's elections

EskomSePush, the app built to track load-shedding schedules, has a new job for tomorrow's local government elections. Its makers have launched ElectionSePush, a results dashboard that will pull in official Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) results ward by ward once voting stations close at 21:00 on Wednesday, 4 November.

The tool sits inside the ESP app and on the web at esp.info/elections. Before results arrive it works as a reference: a map of the nine provinces, a "find my ward" search, and past results for every local election since 2000 and every national and provincial election since 1994.

For a country where municipal results are usually read off broadcaster graphics or the IEC's own results pages, a ward-level view in an app people already open daily is a useful addition. It also shows how a South African consumer product is trying to stay relevant now that the problem it was built for has largely gone away.

Why an outage app is doing elections

ESP grew on load-shedding schedules. That business case has thinned: there were only eight days of load-shedding in 2025, MyBroadband reported, and the company has been shifting towards local community features, a change co-founder Herman Maritz described to the publication.

The audience is still there. ESP says it sees about 300,000 daily users on quiet days and roughly 500,000 during major weather events or utility outages. Few local apps can put a civic tool in front of that many people the night before a vote.

Those two figures are the reason a results page inside this app is different from another website. On a quiet day the app already has about 300,000 people opening it. On a bad-weather or outage day that rises to about 500,000. Election night is closer to the second kind of evening than the first. The product they are opening was built for schedules that, on MyBroadband's count, were needed on only eight days in 2025. Maritz has described the shift toward local community features. ElectionSePush is the civic version of that shift, timed to a vote rather than an outage.

The project was led by co-founder Dan Southwood-Wells. The idea grew out of ESP's work reviewing IEC data to build its maps. The dashboard also carries plain explanations of the process, such as why voters receive more than one ballot in a municipal election, how to get involved and how to spot irregularities.

Before any result is in, the public half of the tool is the reference. Nine provinces on a map. A search that finds a ward. Local results back to 2000. National and provincial results back to 1994. The explanations sit next to that: more than one ballot, how to take part, how to notice something that looks wrong. None of that depends on Wednesday night's count.

Where the numbers come from

Most of the data is the IEC's. ESP says it has an arrangement with the commission that allows it to publish the results, and its election pages credit the IEC as the source.

The headline MyBroadband put on the launch was that the tool can help "spot dodgy results". The detail is more cautious. Southwood-Wells said ESP is working with the IEC to check data it finds unusual, and that figures whose validity is uncertain will either be held back or published with a note in the app and on the web. ESP has not published how it decides what counts as unusual.

That matters on a night when partial counts move fast and rumours move faster. A third-party dashboard that flags a ward as odd before the IEC has explained it could add to the confusion. One that holds back too much becomes a slower copy of the IEC's own feed.

The arrangement, as ESP describes it, is permission to publish the commission's results, with the IEC credited on the election pages. It is not a second count. The cautious part is what happens when a figure looks off. Southwood-Wells said those figures are checked with the IEC, and then either held back or shown with a note, in the app and on the web. What has not been published is the rule that decides "unusual". A reader on Wednesday night can see a note, or see a gap, without being shown the test that produced it.

What is still open

Polls open at 07:00 and close at 21:00 on Wednesday; special votes ran on 2 and 3 November. The real test of ElectionSePush starts after 21:00, when the first results land and readers can see how quickly the app updates, how often it flags data and whether those flags hold up once the IEC finalises the count.

ESP has not said whether the election tool will stay in the app after the results are declared, or whether it plans to charge for any part of it. For now the data is the IEC's, and ESP's method for spotting anomalies has not been published.

Wednesday is the date that makes the launch useful. Special votes have already run, on Monday and Tuesday. Ordinary voting is 07:00 to 21:00. The dashboard's results job starts when the stations close, not when the app update goes out. Until that feed moves, the thing a voter can use is the ward search and the old results. After 21:00, the open questions are speed, how often a figure is flagged, and whether a flag still looks right once the IEC's own count is final. A charge, and a plan to keep the tool after the declaration, are not in what ESP has said.