Voter Registration

My school was the site of a voter registration center.

South African elections are coming up soon: 7 May to be exact. In preparation for the event, the second weekend in February was the last time that South Africans could register to vote. Of all of the things that I have seen organized in this country, this campaign may have been one of the most impressive. My village had a voter registration site located at the primary school, open from 8am to 5pm on both that Saturday and Sunday. There was a huge banner posted outside the school and very professional posters in the shape of arrows posted around the grounds to show people the way to the room where registration took place. Inside the registration room there was a handheld scanner that scanned people’s ID books (similar to a passport) and then printed out information on a sticker that was stuck inside onto an official registration paper. The whole thing was run by two teachers who had been trained how to set everything up and run the registration. When I stopped by on Sunday afternoon, they reported that about 90 people had registered on Saturday and another 75 had registered thus far that day.

More than 160 people came to register
during the Saturday and Sunday period.

Although that may not seem like an overwhelming number (my village is actually quite large), I would venture to say that nearly none of those people would have registered if the only location was in our not-so-nearby shopping town. Certainly my host sister would not have done so. She is 20 years old now, so this is the first national election in which she is eligible to cast a vote (the voting age is 18 – the last election was in 2010.) So the outreach that was being done in the villages by the Electoral Commission was admirable. Just as in America, there is plenty of apathy towards the entire process, but those that complain cannot say that no effort was made and that they were made to feel left out. From what I can see, every effort was made to include everyone in the process and even better, there a quite a few citizens that are taking part.