Howard Barrell
Six million potential voters – one in four – are excluded from voting on June 2. This leaves the way open for the African National Congress to win a two-thirds majority in Parliament with the support of just more than one-third of potential voters.
These stark figures emerge from a study by the Johannesburg-based Centre for Policy Studies. The centre also argues that the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has registered only 75% of potential voters – not the 80% it is claiming. It accuses the IEC of using “dubious” arithmetic “to boost its voter registration figures”.
Despite being defeated in a string of legal actions they brought to increase access to the polls on election day, opposition leaders have been prompted by the figures to express renewed concern for the legitimacy of South Africa’s young democratic institutions.
The leader of the New National Party, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, told the Mail & Guardian this week: “This disenfranchisement of voters is exactly what we were challenging in the Constitutional Court.
“The ANC is busy with huge gerrymandering. In the constituency system, gerrymandering is done by the governing party delimiting the borders of constituencies to its advantage. In a proportional representation system like ours, unscrupulous governing parties are `delimiting’ voters’ rolls to their advantage,” Van Schalkwyk said.
The deputy leader of the Democratic Party, Douglas Gibson, said: “The Constitution holds out the promise that all South Africans should have the right to vote. We have not honoured that promise. We are selling our democracy short.
“We could have increased the legitimacy of our election dramatically if the ANC government had got off its backside several years ago and got to grips with the issues around organising the poll. There were enough warnings to it to do so soon, from among others Frederick van Zyl Slabbert and Judge Johann Kriegler. Now the IEC just complains about a lack of time.”
The head of Statistics SA, Dr Mark Orkin, has, however, disputed the calculations by the Centre for Policy Studies.
In its calculations, the centre’s studies note that the IEC has registered 18,3- million voters. This figure is made up of two categories of South African adults resident in South Africa. The first is those with bar-coded IDs who registered. The second is those without bar-coded IDs, who were eligible to register temporarily with special certificates.
According to Centre for Policy Studies analyst Shaun Mackay, the IEC’s arithmetic becomes strange, however, when it calculates what proportion of potential voters in South Africa it has succeeded in registering.
The IEC says there are 22,8-million potential voters. But, says Mackay, the IEC has excluded from this figure those South African adults without bar-coded IDs who were nonetheless eligible for temporary registration. There are 1,36-million of them, which makes an actual total of 24,3- million potential voters.
Mackay points out that this means the IEC has included the category of temporarily registered voters when working out how many people it has succeeded in registering, but it has then excluded this category when calculating the baseline figure for the total number of potential voters. The effect is to inflate the proportion of potential voters it has succeeded in registering from 75% to 80%.
There are various other implications that flow from the true figure of 24,3-million potential voters.
Mackay points out that, if there is a 75% poll on June 2, as the Human Sciences Research Council predicts, then just 13,7- million voters would turn out and 9,1- million votes would be sufficient to win a two-thirds majority. And those 9,1-million votes would represent just 37% of the total number of potential voters.
Professor Mandla Mchunu, head of the IEC, said the IEC had exceeded its target to register 70% of potential voters, which was an acceptable international benchmark. Thus he had “no reason to try to inflate the figures”. He referred questions on the way the IEC had arrived at its figure for the number of potential voters to Statistics SA.
Orkin disputed Mackay’s calculations. He told the M&G this week: “Given the terms of the electoral Act, the IEC estimate of the percentage of people eligible to register to vote who have actually registered is probably slightly conservative, because allowance had to be made at the time – on the basis of the flows being experienced by the Department of Home Affairs – for people who might acquire bar-coded IDs or temporary registration certificates in time for the final deadline. To my knowledge, this allowance was not reached.”