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The recent voter registration weekend served two critical distinct purposes.
Political parties in all their different formations traversed the length and breadth of our country to encourage voters and would-be voters to go to their different voting districts and verify their registration status.
In case you are taken aback by who these would-be voters are?
All young people who are not yet 18 years old now but would be 18 years old in May 2019, are potential would-be voters by the time general elections are held in 2019.
These would-be voters thus had a right to register as well in the past voter registration weekend.
It gave me a sense of renewal to witness and feel the reinvigorated enthusiasm of the citizens of our country in our thriving young democracy both young and old streaming in numbers to their voting districts.
I felt wow, the va va voom of “thuma mina” is in our veins. We want our country to work.
Might I ventilate my disappointment, though, at the conduct of the DA at my voting district Sharonlea Primary in Randburg.
DA party agents, correctly so, had their display at the entrance of the school and so were other parties as well who were strategically located within the legally permissible IEC boundaries.
Instead of directing voters and would-be voters to where the voter verification and registration were being conducted in the school, DA party agents added another dimension, which was directly in conflict with the rules and regulations specified by the IEC.
When I got to the entrance of the school, a DA party agent coerced me to first go and sign a petition against land expropriation without compensation so that Julius Malema didn’t grab the land.
I said I comprehended and supported the drive to expropriate land without compensation. My grandparents suffered a great deal when their land was dispossessed by the settlers.
I sought to clarify and educate the DA party agent that Parliament was seized with this issue.
It wasn’t Malema’s.
I didn’t want to believe that I wasn’t listened to because of my pigmentation, which was different from the DA party agent I engaged with.
Of course I brought this unlawful act to the attention of the IEC official, who had to keep on going to the DA table to reprimand the DA party agents.
That aside, voters and would-be voters aptly showed their keenness to revive the spirit of our participatory democracy by visiting their various voting districts countrywide.
We are most likely going to record a large percentage of voter turnout in the 2019 general election.
The IEC reported that 2 767 139 voters and would-be voters went to verify and register at their various voting stations during the voter registration period.
To that end, I submit that political parties are already campaigning earnestly.
The IEC has a different kind of headache and how they are going to navigate through this hurdle your guess is as good as mine.
The Constitutional Court’s ruling since the Tlokwe local government disputed by-election debacle, weighs heavily on IEC.
The Constitutional Court, I recall, ruled in November 2015, that the Tlokwe by-elections in 2013 in the North West were not free and fair for lack of proper documentation of voters addresses.
As a consequence of that anomaly subsequently in 2016, the Constitutional Court directed the IEC to, within 18 months, cure the defect by updating the addresses of voters and would-be voters on the national voters roll.
To have the addresses of all voters on the voters roll seems to me too difficult to comply with.
The only document required by the IEC during the past voter registration period, was a legal identity document.
The 18 months Constitutional Court directive to the IEC to ensure that the voters roll is cured and updated prescribes on or before June 2018.
Purely on the grounds of impossibility, I am curious to find out how this impasse will be unjammed. I can’t fathom how the IEC will be able to comply fully, with the Constitutional Court directive.
