At least 16 IEC officials, including presiding officers, have been expelled for underhanded activities during the voting period.
This was confirmed by IEC provincial electoral officer Kayakazi Magudumana on Thursday.
Magudumana said six officials were arrested at one voting station, and among those arrested were presiding officers, deputy presiding officers and ordinary voting staff.
"They went to special voters to administer home visits," Magudumana said.
"Instead of issuing three ballots, they issued only one ballot while the other ballots were actually part of the consignment of the material that they were carrying.
"On their return to the station, instead of just reporting that they had made a mistake, they then tried to reconcile and balance by tearing up the other ballot papers that they did not issue at the home.
"That is a criminal offence. We have opened a case and fired them because that is fraudulent."
Magudumana said the other station was in Ntsika Yethu, where staff went for home visits on the first day of special votes.
There were 20 applicants on the list. They were able to administer 10 votes and the other 10 were not found at home.
"They returned the material back to the storage site," Magudumana said.
"On day two, there was no activity in the voting station since there was no one who applied [to vote].
"On election day at the time of integration, they then realised that the 10 ballot papers that were administered on day one of special votes were actually missing when it was time for counting.
"The parties were angry as to what happened to these ballots and there were trust issues.
"We felt that we needed to take everything from the voting station and have it counted elsewhere.
"The 10 ballots remain missing. We've opened a case against the presiding officer.
"There is an [ongoing] investigation as well with the security forces because [responsibility for] the storage is not ours.
"The presiding officer should have detected if there was something wrong with the ballot box when collecting the votes from storage.
"We train these people for months — an election process is a legal process.
"Therefore, there should be accountability, and there should be consequences when people do things wrong.
"The unfortunate part about the organisation that we are in, there's no way to know whether a person will do those things."
Only six municipalities in Sarah Baartman have finalised capturing votes.