WATCH: Registration weekend is finally here

It’s all hands on deck for the voter registration weekend on September 18 and 19, says the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC).

This follows the Constitutional Court’s dismissal of the IEC’s application to postpone the local government elections until next year, and the subsequent announcement that South Africans will head to the polls on November 1.

Also Read: What you need to know about the voter registration weekend

Granville Abrahams, IEC senior manager electoral matters, says because of the preparation they had done for the registration weekends that were meant to be held in July, the IEC had only to wipe off the dust and carry on from where it had left off. Planned registration drives were postponed twice in July – first as a result of a Covid-19 surge, and then because of the possibility that the elections would be postponed until next year.

By July, we already had our materials, registration devices, staffing, and venues in place, so preparing for this weekend was not too onerous, says Abrahams.

“But it was not a bed of roses; we had to check whether our venues were still available for the new date, so we had to do some follow-up work there,” he says.

While this final registration weekend will be a blessing for people without the means to register online or travel to their local IEC office, many people have already registered or updated their details online.

“Initially, the process was slow, but since the beginning of September, more than 100 000 people have registered online,” Abrahams says. “At the moment, we are seeing about 20 000 voters registering each day.”

Online registrations close at midnight on Monday, September 20.

Click here to access the online voter registration portal.

Despite the high uptake in online registrations, Abrahams says 15 million eligible voters are not registered, the bulk of which are youth. He says encouraging younger people to vote is one of the IEC’s biggest challenges.

Candidate registration process

The IEC’s decision to give political parties more time to register candidates gave the ANC a much-needed opportunity to register candidates in 93 municipalities, which it failed to do in the previous candidate registration round.

“The court issued orders, and they denied our request to postpone the elections. The court did not issue a judgment. Therefore, we are comfortable that we took the right decision to re-open the candidate registration process,” Abrahams says.

The DA, however, is taking the IEC back to court to contest its candidate registration decision.

Watch: Journalist Izak du Plessis talks to the IEC’s Granville Abrahams about the registration weekend and other electoral issues.