South Africa votes in local government elections in November, and the seat maths has a flaw nobody has planned for: the “overhang”. Frans Cronje, Gabriel Makin, and James Myburgh walk through the full scenario: how a party with a quarter of the vote can end up running the council, why it has already happened in Kai ǃGarib, a municipality in the Northern Cape that includes Kakamas, and why the only way to fix this runs through the Constitutional Court in the middle of coalition talks.