During a visit to Bloemfontein on Friday, 23 February, Vice-Chairperson (VC) of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), Terry Tselane, has confirmed that it is all systems go for the commission’s harvesting weekend on 10 and 11 March.
Voters from every corner in South Africa will be expected to either register or update their personal information and addresses on the voters’ roll during this weekend.
The IEC has made efforts to “Address the Voters’ Roll” by introducing two phases of the project.
The first phase was the online address capturing/update which was themed: “Click, Check and Confirm”.
The 2nd phase will take place on 10 and 11 March 2018, themed: “Let’s Address the Voters’ Roll”. The main objective of the weekend is to ensure that voters’ addresses are captured in the IEC.
“This registration weekend is a milestone towards the culmination of a two-year project to obtain addresses for all registered voters. It is an opportunity to ensure that voters are registered in the correct voting districts. South Africans might recall the ruling of the Constitutional Court in 2016, which gave the IEC until June 2018 to update the voters’ roll with all available addresses,” Chief Electoral Officer, Sy Mamabolo, said in a statement recently issued.
Through a series of interventions by the IEC, significant progress has been made in updating addresses on the voters’ roll.
Despite this, more than 2, 8 million voters remain vacant from the IEC’s voters’ roll.
In the Free State, 1531 voting stations across the province will be opened from 08:00 to 17:00 on that weekend.
The province has recruited 4585 registration staff, consisting of one registration supervisor and two registration officers per station.
Furthermore, the IEC will communicate through posters, billboards, radio adverts, television adverts, social media as well as newspapers in order to reach out to voters as part of its campaign and mission to reduce the number of missing voters’ addresses as per the mandate given to it by the court.
Voters will require a green bar-coded ID/Smart Card/Temporary Identification Certificate to participate during the weekend.
The weekend will also present an opportunity for those who have not registered to do so.
Although addresses are needed, the IEC does not require a proof of residence for the project. In the absence of a formal address, the IEC has made provision for such cases by designing a descriptive form called the ‘REC-AS’ form that will detail the residential particulars of a voter.
Pulane Choane
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