With 30% of Nelson Mandela Bay votes counted by 10.30am, the DA has taken an early lead.
By 10.30am, the DA had 39.36%, while the ANC, in second place, had 27.75%.
The EFF and PA were trailing in third and fourth place, respectively.
And the SACP was emerging as a strong contender to secure a top-five spot in the Bay council at the time of publication.
Speaking from the city's results centre at the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium, DA Eastern Cape leader Andrew Whitfield said votes from several traditionally strong DA and ANC wards were still outstanding.
"We're very confident of growth.
"We've seen some voter enthusiasm among DA supporters at levels we last saw in 2016.
"We're confident we're going to grow our support from 2021, when we were down to 39%, and we received 48 seats.
"I'm confident we're going to get more seats, and we'll be the biggest party in Nelson Mandela Bay by a significant margin, and we'll be in a position to put together a government," he said.
Whitfield said the party's goal was to win an outright majority, but they would have to wait to see how the votes stacked up.
"There may be surprises, but in the event coalitions must be negotiated, they must be negotiated with the citizens at heart.
"Stability, service delivery and good governance are non-negotiables.
"We've learnt a lot of lessons over the past 10 years about partners we can trust and those we can't.
"The future of the metro and the Eastern Cape's economy depends on a metro, which is the economic engine of our province, being stable so businesses can create jobs for people," Whitfield said.
Nelson Mandela Bay electoral officer Dumisani Mbebe said counting started with the closure of all 268 voting stations in the metro, with 29% of proportional representation (PR) votes and 34% of ward votes captured so far.
"The process is running very slowly. We still have wards that are busy counting.
"So you can see that the interest is very high and the turnout is very high," he said.
"Before we closed yesterday, we were sitting at 41.3% of the turnout."
Mbebe said with 636,660 registered voters on the roll, "we are hopeful that at least 80% of them managed to come out over the past three days.
"During the special vote days, the 9,971 approved special votes for home voting did manage to cast their votes.
"And then the 132,676 station-visit voters managed to cast their votes."
He said the counting and auditing of votes would conclude on Friday.
The Herald