The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) will be back in action before the dust of the historic April 22 polls has settled.

With a string of by-elections coming up and preparations for the 2011 local government polls, the IEC leadership said on Wednesday they would have barely enough time to recover from running the country's largest election since 1994.

Chief electoral officer Pansy Tlakula said on Wednesday she would be on a flight to Gambia the day after the May 9 Presidential inauguration to carry out African Union duties.

"We are sitting for 15 days... I have 30 complaints to read and write judgements for, so there will be no rest yet.

"And, then I have to go to Oslo for a meeting... and then back to prepare for local elections from June."

She was speaking on the sidelines of the handover of the list of designated Members of Parliament for the National Assembly to Constitutional Court Chief Justice Pius Langa.

IEC chairperson Brigalia Bam said she would take a brief time-out this weekend to "regain [her] own spirituality".

"I believe... the people who really need to go on holiday before I do are my colleagues, because these women and men were working day and night.

"I will take some time off over this long weekend that is coming and I will be with my family and it is fantastic... I will be having a ceremony for my mother, which is also something that will help me to relax and regain my own spirituality, which is always important after meetings of this nature."

During the April 22 elections the commission was both hailed for its tireless efforts and vilified.

Voting stations ran out of ballot papers and ballot boxes, ballot boxes containing marked papers were found in parts of the country, a presiding electoral officer attempting suicide with scissors, while another was arrested for fraud.

It had been told it "couldn't run a bath", called "toothless tigers" and accused of bias.

The commission said it would look back on the past election and learn from its mistakes.

Deputy chief electoral officer Mosotho Moeypa said: "We will be debriefing, how did it work, what can we do better. Within the IEC, provinces are busy debriefing now.

"We will then all come together and have a national debriefing meeting in the next four weeks, because there is a lot of work that the guys in the provinces still need to do.

"I'm almost certain that the issue of people voting everywhere like we have had, we are going to get the view on that. We are also going to download the 'zip-zip' [machine that contains the names of registered voters] and see what the data coming from there is telling us. All of these things, are going to come out of the works now."

He would take a break during June.

"And then in 2011, we are going back to war again."