Quality elections – A thorn in the side of democracy

Quality elections require all eligible voters to be on the voters’ roll. After all, voting is a constitutional right. But experience shows some voters need help to actually use their voting right.

At face value, it doesn’t look like it was a bad turnout in the 2019 general elections, with 66% of those registered had voted.

But when one looks at the figure including all eligible voters – adult citizens over the age of 18 – it drops to about 46%.

The turnout at the local government elections was more abysmal. Only 45% of registered voters – or a horrifying 32% of eligible voters – went to the polls.

About one-third of those eligible to vote are not even on the electoral register.

This is not good enough for a country claiming to be a democracy.

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If so many citizens cannot participate, the political leadership will have reduced legitimacy and credibility, and the citizens will have less trust in them to run the country effectively.

SA’s poor election turnout has not improved despite many registration campaigns by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), so it is high time to realise the only way to get a more realistic view of, and to better gauge, the state of democratic participation is to shift to a more reliable, inclusive system: automatic voter registration.

This system would mean the state takes steps to ensure automatic registration of all eligible voters onto a voters’ roll.

It is normally done by linking voter registration to the existing national ID or social security system. The idea is that everybody in the country is already registered, with all the necessary information, so there is no need to duplicate.

This is not compulsory voting, which should be avoided.

Voters are still free to vote or not, but automatic registration means the entire adult citizenry can vote. They don’t need to have been registered beforehand. They can react to what is happening or said during the election campaign and then express their opinion, without having to have gone through a separate voter registration process.

The other benefit of automatic voter registration is that the home affairs department will have easier access to more up-to-date information about citizens’ whereabouts.

It is required to notify the department of a change of address, but in reality, nobody does this.

So, in the process of ensuring everybody in the country is actually registered as a voter, one can also ensure there is a better reflection of where those people are situated.

A concern is whether this system will fuel fraud. The answer, on the whole, is no.

In order to avoid fraud within the automatic voter registration system, when a person dies, they are automatically deleted from the national register, therefore also from the voter register.

This doesn’t mean fraud cannot happen. But in countries where this system is used, it’s very rare.

A more important question is: how can we introduce automatic voter registration when home affairs is functioning (or rather, not functioning) the way it is?

It isn’t something that could be immediately implemented. It would require that structures which can handle the new system first be put in place.

It would not necessarily have to be within home affairs, it could be some other body, even the IEC. But whichever body takes on the task, it would have to be properly capacitated and funded.

Automatic voter registration would require legislation and decisions of a complicated nature, but the current situation, where more than half the population is not voting, is a serious problem, that has to be dealt with in order to salvage our democracy.

Swanepoel is chief executive of the Inclusive Society Institute

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