Johannesburg - With around two-thirds of the votes in South Africa's general elections counted on Friday, the ruling African National Congress of Jacob Zuma had a commanding majority of around 67 percent.

Results from Wednesday's national and provincial elections were still trickling into the central election centre in Pretoria, two days after voting.

The Independent Electoral Commission said all the votes had been counted but that the verification and data entry was still ongoing.

Final results are expected by Friday evening.

The IEC does not yet have a figure for how many people voted in total but estimates that 80 per cent of the around 23 million registered voters, or about 18.5 million people cast a ballot.

With 12.9 million, or apparently over two-thirds of those results posted, the ANC had 67 per cent of the vote, against 15.8 for the biggest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA) of Cape Town mayor Helen Zille.

The ANC won 70 per cent in the last election, against 12 per cent for the DA.

The new Congress of the People, a breakaway party of ANC dissidents formed last year after the ANC's ousting of Thabo Mbeki as president, was trailing a distant third at
7.7 per cent.

COPE, which is supported mainly by middle-class black voters, has said it hopes for a slightly improved score once results from the big cities - Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban - come in later Friday.

On Thursday, ANC leader Jacob Zuma led thousands of ANC supporters in song and dance at a victory rally outside party headquarters in downtown Johannesburg.

As leader of the biggest party, Zuma is poised to become South Africa's fourth democratically-elected president within days, following in the footsteps of Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe, the country's caretaker president of the last seven months since Mbeki's resignation.

After the elections, the newly-constituted National Assembly in Cape Town will sit to elect him president. The ANC has nominated him for the job. (dpa)