Councillors happy with voter registration turnout

January 26 and 27 marked the final registration for the upcoming national elections in May.

Unfortunately, according to the South African Citizens Survey, at least 11.2 million eligible South Africans will not vote in May 2019.

These are citizens who have chosen not to register, for a variety of reasons, and most of them belong to the youth.

This comes as no surprise as most of the venues we visited were rather quiet.

The regulations of the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) state that, to be able to vote, you must register as a voter.

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Once you have registered, your details appear on the voters’ roll, which contains over 20 million names.

The voters’ roll helps the IEC to plan an election and, if need be, identify fraud, as it tells us how many voters to expect in each voting district.

Voters who had previously registered were not required to re-register.

The general sense in Springs is that the registration went well.

Ward 72 councillor Ramesh Sheodin says, “It was encouraging to see that many unregistered voters came out to the final registration weekend to register.

“It was incident-free in my ward.

“The turnout indicates that voters are looking for change in the national and provincial governments.

“The next step is to come out and vote in large numbers in the upcoming May elections.”

Ward 75 councillor Dean Stone says he is happy with the turnout.

“Everything went very well, as far as we are concerned.

“There were no hiccups with the IEC setting up,

“It looks like many people came out.

“I just have a concern that our pensioners in retirement homes may not have been able to get to the venues.

“But I am in conversations with the IEC and we will soon make arrangements to visit the retirement homes.”

We asked first-time voters why they registered to vote and the difference they believe their vote could make.