More than 13-million South Africans of voting age are not registered to vote. If past voter registration drives are anything to go by, the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) may spend up to R419m per registration drive before the local government elections in November, in the hope of adding a portion of the eligible but unregistered pool of South Africans to the voters’ roll.
Automatic registration offers a better way. Technologically, South Africa is already most of the way there and, frankly, it should be part of a wider conversation on automatic enrolment in other areas such as retirement savings.
South Africans who have never voted before need to register to vote. This process has been made easier in recent years with the introduction of online registration. However, it still has not been enough to bring mostly young, unemployed South Africans into the fold.
If only 3% of the previously unregistered voted this would add about 390,000 additional voters to the voters’ roll. Distributed across the metros proportionally to their share of the registered electorate, each major metro might have 50,000-100,000 additional votes.
It’s not obvious who the immediate beneficiary would be of such an intervention. The latest market research from Ipsos shows that at a national level political party support doesn’t vary significantly whether you look at registered voters or the overall eligible voter population.
However, in places where margins are narrow between the largest party and the second largest, an increase of just 50,000 voters makes a big difference. It would all depend on which newly registered voters turn up on election day ― with urban voters more likely to make that choice.
In Tshwane the ANC won 466,041 votes (34.63% of the total), with the DA the second-largest party on 431,042 votes (32.03%). This is a gap of 34,999 votes.
Similarly, in Nelson Mandela Bay the DA won 39.92% of the vote and the ANC 39.43%; a margin of less than half a percentage point. In absolute terms, based on total votes cast in that metro, that translates to a gap of about 1,900 votes.
If automatic registration delivered only a small fraction of new voters and no major change nationally, it could nonetheless have an outsize effect on the political future of some municipal councils.
Parliament is due to consider a bill to introduce a 1% electoral threshold for municipal representation. This is a supply-side fix designed to reduce the kingmaker power of parties that in a city such as Johannesburg may represent a few thousand voters.
Automatic registration addresses the same problem from the demand side: rather than limiting who can govern with a handful of votes it expands the pool of voters making the choice in the first place. A more complete electorate is more likely to produce the clearer mandates that make the threshold bill unnecessary.
It is by far the more democratic way to address unclear mandates and at the very least should be the first option explored.
Technologically we have, and continue to build out, the digital infrastructure to make this a reality. Ideally the country needs digital identity verification and address verification.
South Africa has invested heavily in a sophisticated national identity infrastructure. Recent upgrades to the digital verification system will further improve the ability across government departments to confirm identities against the National Population Register and ensure a more fraud-proof digital identity supported by biographic and biometric data.
What remains is the ability to assign someone to a ward without a reliable address. MzansiXchange, a pilot project launched in October 2025, facilitates real-time information verification between government departments, enabling streamlined digital government services, making it the prime option to fill this gap.
The address data the South African Social Security Agency holds for grant recipients is one of South Africa’s most comprehensive address databases for lower-income citizens. This data could in principle flow through MzansiXchange to the IEC to assign ward addresses. This can be complimented by South African Revenue Service data, which holds address data for taxpayers.
The unregistered 13-million voting-age adults are overwhelmingly young, urban and lower-income. If the electorate is structurally skewed before a single ballot is cast, it minimises their share of voice in policy priorities. Leaving aside whose fault that is, it’s difficult to imagine how this could not be a source of rising resentment, feeding a breeding ground of support for populists and authoritarians.
Automatic enrolment may well be the democratically principled and pragmatic choice to avoid political instability.
• Ngwenya chairs the American Chamber of Commerce (South Africa) Policy Forum. She writes in her personal capacity.
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