The facility is only for registered voters to provide and update their address details and is not an online registration facility.
In this initial phase, the online facility will also only be available to the estimated three million registered voters for whom no address is currently on the voters’ roll.
The affected voters are being contacted and requested to submit their addresses online via a targeted SMS campaign.
It is planned to open the system to all registered voters to check and update their address details in later phases of the campaign which will also include additional opportunities for voters to provide their address details – including those without access to the internet.
The initiative forms part of on-going efforts to enhance and update the voters’ roll with the address details of all voters where available, following the ruling of the Constitutional Court in June 2016.
In a widely publicised ruling, the Constitutional Court gave the Electoral Commission until June 2018 to rectify deficiencies on the national common voters’ roll with regards to missing addresses.
In March 2016, about 7.85 million (32 per cent) of the 26 million registered voters had no address details on the voters’ roll and an estimated 8.6 million (34 per cent) of addresses were incomplete.
Through a variety of initiatives, this has been significantly and systematically improved:
• The proportion of complete addresses increased from 32 per cent of registered voters to over 72 per cent of registered voters.
• The proportion of incomplete addresses has decreased from 34 per cent to 14 per cent.
• The percentage of registered voters without a recorded address on the voters’ roll has been reduced from 32 per cent to 12 per cent.
Among the measures taken to date include:
• Checking all records and storage to find any registration forms which have address details which the Electoral Commission may not have captured.
• Asking voters to update their address details during the April 2016 voter registration weekend.
• Asking voters without addresses to complete an address form on Election Day, for the 2016 municipal elections (this initiative generated almost three million addresses).
• The Electoral Commission has focused on obtaining missing addresses for voters during all by-elections held since July 2016.
The Electoral Commission has started sending out SMSes to voters whose addresses are not on record and for whom it was able to source a cellphone number, requesting them to submit their address via www.elections.org.za
They will first need to register on the website and provide a username and password for security purposes.
