Monumental task for IEC

With only months to go to the municipal elections, the Constitutional Court has presented the Independent Electoral Commission with a colossal challenge.

Requiring proof of address for every voter, to ensure each is voting in the right ward, will mean a headache for our voting administrators. How does one ascertain the addresses of the millions who have no erf numbers, no street numbers, and not even street names?

Traditional proof of residence will largely be impossible for our election managers, especially in the time available. But do it they must, the court has ruled: “...The Electoral Commission is obliged to obtain sufficient particularity of the voter’s address to enable it to ensure that the voter is at the time of registration ordinarily resident in that voting district,” it said.

In the last municipal polls in 2011, more than 13 350 000 voters turned out. If the interest is anything like this next year, a mountain of verification lies immediately ahead.

Innovation is the only way. Lame threats of criminal consequences for false addresses will not do it. The IEC is going to have to devise satisfactory ways to establish that people are voting in their wards, and are not being bused, as those political parties who can afford it sometimes do.

Satisfy whom? The courts. If not, the elections will be challengeable and reruns will be likely in the light of this week’s Constitutional Court ruling that seven by-elections in the North West municipality of Tlokwe in 2013 were not free and fair.

It ruled that the IEC give candidates full voter lists in future, with their addresses. And it ordered fresh elections in Tlokwe – something the country can ill-afford on a greater scale next year.

The IEC too, trusted and respected so far, could not afford the reputational setback this would mean. Rejection of its management of the Tlokwe by-elections has already been a severe blow.

“It is essential to hold the IEC to the high standards that its constitutional duties impose on it,” the court said. The IEC must respond.