I am writing to reflect on the final voter registration over April 9 to 10.
Residents of ward 32 responded in their numbers to the final call for voter registration over the past weekend. All six voting stations were a hive of festivities for the entire duration of the registration weekend.
The confusing SMS messages sent out to voters by the IEC on Friday before the elections, had both IEC officials and to a large extent, DA party agents, calming emotional voters whose names mysteriously vanished from the current voters’ roll between the 2014 elections and the final registration weekend.
One voter residing in Parkrand was completely taken aback on discovering that her deceased husband’s details are on the voters’ roll but hers disappeared, whereas they both voted in May 2014 at the same voting station.
Ivan Tyler, a DA party agent at the Parkrand voting station, referred the matter to the DA and advised the voter to re-register instead as this was indeed the last registration weekend.
Many voters living in Van Wyk Louw Street in Parkrand were also sent back and forth as the IEC officials either could not interpret the newly drawn map on which Van Wyk Louw Street serves as a border between the Parkrand voting station and Boksburg Sport Stadium voting station.
Voters living on the side of the road with uneven numbers have been demarcated into the Boksburg Sport Stadium Voting District, which was hard to understand by residents.
It was also quite clear that the IEC did not communicate the newly drawn voting districts and its implications to affected residents.
On the brighter side of the registration weekend and through all the emotions projected by voters, the registration process proceeded smoothly.
The DA ward 32 branch is quite pleased with the extraordinary high volume of new registrations and people who visited the voting stations to check their voter status.
By the end of Sunday at 5pm, we had recorded 2 160 registrations in ward 32, a 100% increase since the last registration.
