The Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) is in a race against time to verify the particulars and addresses of 7.2-million people on the voters roll ahead of the 2019 general election.
The credibility of the 2019 poll hinges on the IEC ensuring that the voters roll meets acceptable norms and standards, as prescribed by the Constitutional Court.
In June 2016, the Constitutional Court ordered the electoral authority to verify, as well as add, voters’ residential addresses on the roll following a successful application to the court by independent candidates who contested the outcomes of by-elections in Tlokwe, North West, in 2013.
The court gave the IEC 18 months to complete the task but suspended the order for the period, paving the way for the August 2016 local government elections to be held.
New chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo, who succeeded Mosotho Moepya, will oversee the process of cleaning up the roll. In its annual performance plan tabled in Parliament, the IEC states that one of its strategic objectives in 2018-19 is to have 1.2-million voters captured correctly in the roll by the end of the financial year, which begins on April 1 2018 and ends at the end of March 2019.
"Our strategic objective is to ensure an up-to-date and comprehensive voters roll ahead of every statutory election by, inter alia, ensuring that addresses or sufficient particulars for voters without addresses are captured on the voters roll in accordance with the judgment of the Constitutional Court," says a section of the IEC’s performance plan.
Even though the IEC has reduced the number of voters without physical addresses on the roll by millions since the 2016-17 financial year, the total number is still massive.
"On the national common voters roll as at March 31 2016 there were 16.4-million voters for whom the electoral commission did not have addresses of sufficient particularities."
The annual performance plan says that the commission managed to reduce the number of registered voters without a physical address captured in the roll by 9.2-million in the 2016-17 financial year.
Mamabolo said compliance with the Constitutional Court ruling was among the commission’s foremost priorities ahead of the 2019 election.
Lemias Mashile, the chairman of the portfolio committee on home affairs, which exercises parliamentary oversight on the IEC, said: "There is no situation where all physical addresses for all voters in the country, especially if they do not have all the money required, [will be verified].
"Over a period of time they [IEC] can come to 80% or 90%."
The commission said R374m would be allocated over the medium term to source the addresses of the voters on the roll in line with the Constitutional Court judgment and procure election material.
The commission also needs to replace 32,000 zip-zip machines used to capture voter ID numbers over the medium term at the cost of R369m. "For this, the commission receives an allocation of R180m in 2017-18 from the Department of Home Affairs and plans to provide R189m of its own funds generated through savings to make up the total project costs," the annual performance plan says.
The commission made adjusted estimates of about R71m to account for the financial effect of municipal and ward boundary changes by the Municipal Demarcation Board. Expenditure on employee pay is expected to increase over the medium-term period from R595m in 2017-18 to R804m in the year before the elections.
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