The IEC has announced that it is 95% ready for the elections. Photo by Gallo Images
IN less than 43 days, South Africans will head to the polls to vote for their new government.
The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) will oversee the elections and has announced that it is 95% ready.
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What eligible and registered voters should know is that:
- There are three ballot papers. The National ballot will consist of a list of political parties vying for 200 seats in the National Assembly. According to the IEC, this ballot will be used to vote for political parties.
- There will be 52 political parties on this national ballot, and the configuration will be a dual column.
- The second ballot will be the Regional or Province-to-National, with political parties and independent candidates contesting for the seats reserved for each province in the National Assembly.
- IEC CEO Sy Mamabolo said voters will use this ballot to elect a political party or an independent candidate to represent them in the National Assembly. He said the number of contestants ranges from 30 to 44 on regional ballots.
- The third ballot will be the Provincial ballot. This ballot will be unique to each province and includes parties and independent candidates competing for seats in each respective provincial legislature.
- Mamabolo said this ballot will allow voters to choose either a political party or an independent candidate to represent them in provincial legislatures. The number of contestants ranges from 24 to 45 on the provincial legislature’s ballots.
- The Commission has decided that the design of the ballot papers will be underpinned by the following identifiers: the full registered name of the party, the photograph of the registered party leader, the registered abbreviated name of the party, and the registered emblem or symbol of the party.
- In respect of independent candidates, the ballot papers will have the name of the independent, the photograph bearing the face of the independent and the word INDEPENDENT.
- Applications for Special votes, home visits and voting station visits opened on 15 April 2024 and will close on 3 May 2024
- Voters are reminded that they may only vote at the voting station at which they are registered.
- Voters who will inevitably be away from their voting districts on election day, 29 May, may give Section 24A notice of their intention to vote at another identified voting station by no later than 17 May 2024.
Mamabolo urged voters to carefully review and mark each of these three ballot papers before depositing them into the ballot box.
“Our appeal to voters is to remember that they can only put one mark on each ballot. More than one mark will result in a spoiled vote and not counted,” he said.
