Over 3 Million South Africans Visited Voting Stations on Weekend

More than 3 million people visited their voting stations over the past weekend to register for the first time, to re-register and to update their registration details, the Electoral Commission of South Africa said in a statement on Tuesday.

The IEC said it believed “the results show without doubt that South Africans remain highly committed to democracy and participation in elections at all levels. This bodes extremely well for the upcoming 2016 Municipal Elections and for the future”.

The highly contested elections – with the ANC-controlled cities of Johannesburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth looking quite likely to change leadership – have to take place between May and August.

The commission said the activity over the weekend was more than double that recorded during the first registration weekend for the previous Municipal Elections in 2011 and a 23 percent increase over registration activity during the first registration weekend in the 2014 National and Provincial Elections.

Of the 3,097,194 voters who visited voting stations this weekend:
• 692,730 were new registrations (and 78.6 percent were under 30 years old)
• 1,086,958 were re-registrations in different voting districts; and
• 1,317,506 visited to confirm and update their registration in the same voting district.

Kwazulu-Natal (24 percent) and Gauteng (22.5 percent) together accounted for almost half of all new registrations.