IEC’s new online system

On 16 May, the Independent Electoral Commission launched the first phase of an online address capture facility where registered voters can provide their address details on the IEC’s website.

The facility is only for voters who are already registered and need to update their address details, it is not for online registration.

This initiative forms part of ongoing efforts to update the voters’ roll with the address details of all voters, where available, following a ruling of the Constitutional Court in June last year. In the ruling, the Concourt gave the IEC until June next year to rectify the national common voters’ roll with regards to missing addresses.

The IEC’s spokesperson Kate Bapela said in this initial phase, the online facility will also only be available to the approximately three million registered voters whose address details are currently not on the voters’ roll.

Bapela said the affected voters are being contacted and requested to submit their addresses online via a targeted SMS campaign.

“The system is planned to be open 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,” she said.

In March last year, Bapela said 32 per cent of the 26 million registered voters had no address details on the voters’ roll and 34 per cent of addresses were incomplete.

She said this has been significantly and systematically improved through a variety of initiatives and added that the percentage of complete addresses increased from 32 per cent of registered voters to over 72 per cent.

She said incomplete addresses had decreased from 34 per cent to 14 per cent, and the percentage of registered voters without a recorded address on the voters’ roll had 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 IEC may not have captured. Also, we asked voters to update their address details during the April 2016 voter registration weekend,” said Bapela.

Bapela said they had generated almost three million addresses by asking voters without addresses to complete an address form on election day of last year’s municipal elections.

Details: www.elections.org.za

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