SPLITTING YOUR VOTE - VOTING FOR SMALLER PARTIES I always regarded the debate around splitting your vote as an interesting one, but some of my current consulting work elsewhere has now forced me to sit down with the problem and have a look at the pros and cons as a political conflict analysis. South African local politics has a structural problem that conflict scholars recognize, one that we can sum up as: power is being divided faster than the capacity to share it is growing. Coalitions, and how we manage them, is the biggest influence on that part of the question. Between 2021 and February 2026, 80 of 213 directly elected councils, or 37.6%, were hung at some point. The Coalitions Bill has stalled and will not shape immediate post-election negotiation, so outcomes will be driven by the existing coalition culture. And as we can see, and I point out often, our politicians are particularly inept at understanding and manipulating the power that is available in effective coalition politics. Even the national partnership offers little comfort, and the GNU has done little to change how the ANC and DA behave towards each other in municipalities, where they keep toppling each other’s governments. Recent public commentary makes it clear that this is more likely to escalate, rather than settle into something more constructive. If we were more skilled at coalition politics much of this crisis would be a non-event. You end up in a coalition scenario, you know what to do, the voting does not affect your strategy all that much. The intended voting legislation would have helped, to some extent. It may, hopefully, do so at some future stage. So we cannot duck the question by using coalitions as conflict solutions. We need to get back to that question: what happens if I vote for the smaller parties? Do I harm the bigger parties, or even the national interests? Short answer: you need to look at a few moving parts first. The argument rests on three points: First, negotiating power comes apart from the mandate. Smaller parties have tasted the power of kingmaking, becoming vote deciding members of coalitions even with one seat. A party carrying two per cent of the vote can extract concessions worth far more than its support. It can also withdraw at any moment, and withdrawal is exactly what collapses councils. Negotiation theory calls this a credible commitment problem: the more veto players at the table, the less any deal can be trusted to hold. Residents bear the cost, because a council that is paralyzed or turning over mayors cannot pass a credible budget or maintain a water network or be as effective as our other unresolved conflicts demand. Ask Gqeberha and a few others how that works out. Second, fragmentation dilutes the thing you are trying to change. The 2021 Tshwane result is instructive. The DA, ActionSA and FF+ together took 48.5% of the vote, yet split three ways they delivered an unstable arrangement instead of a mandate. A dozen parties each taking 2% of a ward’s vote do less to unseat an incumbent than two or three parties consolidating that same 24% behind one credible alternative. The ward ballot, which is first-past-the-post, punishes this arithmetic most severely. Third, abundance of choice is not the same as representation. We simply have too many political parties. Since 2024, 62 new parties have registered, bringing the total to 508, yet 47% of South Africans say no party represents them. Johannesburg’s proportional ballot alone will carry 75 parties. Choice at this scale produces noise, not accountability. The practical advice from this study is to weigh your two ballots differently. On the ward ballot, where only one candidate wins, back the contender who can realistically win and govern. On the proportional ballot, ask whether the party has a coalition record you can defend, and not only a manifesto you like. Before that final choice, bear two things in mind. First, the loudest advocate of consolidation is an interested party. Helen Zille has repeatedly argued that voting for smaller parties splits the anti-ANC vote. That may be sincere, but it is also what a party defending its own base would say. That call for a unified vote is, however completely correct if the lenses we are using here point in that direction, as you can calculate for yourself below. Second, the “wasted vote” claim is only half right, at best. Stellenbosch’s Collette Schulz-Herzenberg notes that on the proportional half of the ballot there is no such thing as a wasted vote, and that small parties can serve as kingmakers. And here is the real focus: splitting also matters less than it appears where the parties intend to govern together. FF+ leader Corné Mulder says his party wants to form a coalition with the DA in Tshwane, and one July poll put the two parties at a combined 51%. In that case a vote for the FF+ may help build a majority rather than prevent one. Other polling is less generous: Ipsos puts the DA at 31% in Tshwane. This makes parties who fail to make their intentions clear in advance the architects of their own misfortune. Call for the complete win, but explain to voters what your plans are based on one or two probable scenarios if the vote is split. The conclusion is that the consolidation case is strongest on the ward ballot and in contests where the smaller party is hostile to the larger one. It is weakest where the two parties are natural partners. If you are concerned about the effect of your vote for a small party, the defensible strategy is to judge each party on its coalition record and not on how loudly it condemns its rivals. Seen from the other side of the question, this approach also partly answers solutions suggested by parties such as the DA, where they understandably would rather go into opposition mode than struggle with unworkable coalitions. If we were better at coalition politics, this stance would not have been necessary. Even if we accept the current level of management potential, that opposition can still be avoided if the right numbers can work together, as we saw earlier. "We can never govern in coalition with them" should not be the stone wall it is now, it should be the honest start to progress. So voting for the smaller party or not does not have an easy answer, but this is a very specific framework that you can use to answer the question for the city or district where you are voting