When Moegammad-Yaseen Salie, 19, went to register to vote for the first time at his local polling station in Cape Town, his mother, Shameemah Salie, was so excited she made a video of the moment. A few weeks later that excitement was dashed when Moegammad-Yaseen went back to vote and officials told him his name was nowhere to be found on the voters roll or on the voter management devices (VMDs) that were being used for the first time in the 2021 local government elections.
It changed Salie’s view of the way the polls were run. She tells the FM: "I have never come across an election that is this bad. And if anyone says this election is free and just, they need to go revisit all the incidents and concerns that have been raised."
Salie, a spokesperson for political party Al Jama’ah, says she knows of a number of people who endured a similar fate. One is Hedwig Groenewald, Freedom Front Plus secretary in the North West and wife of party leader Pieter Groenewald.
She had registered for a special vote, but when she got to her polling station in Stilfontein the day before the elections, her name didn’t appear on the list. She was able to prove she was registered, and eventually allowed to vote. But it was a struggle.
"Of course I don’t trust [the electoral commission] processes," Groenewald says. "On that Saturday [during special voting] there were no envelopes for special votes at various polling stations. I believe many voters didn’t go back to vote again."
Groenewald says she has served for years on the municipal party liaison committee of the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC). She believes the training of staff for the November 1 local government poll was lacking.
"I don’t think the IEC was ready for these elections," she says.
The VMDs, which were bought last year for about R500m, were supposed to make it easier to manage the voters roll and guard against fraud. In the 2019 general elections there was a huge controversy when it was claimed that substandard permanent ink — which could be washed off — made it possible for those with the new ID cards to vote twice. Previously, a stamp in the green ID book acted as a control measure.
The old zip-zip scanning machines, acquired in 1998, were not connected to the voters roll and could not act as a control measure to prevent voters going on to cast another ballot at other voting stations.
The IEC, even despite the challenges it has had for this election, remains an institution that South Africans should be rightly proud of
— Grant Masterson
Still, despite incidents such as those affecting Salie and Groenewald, electoral commissioners have expressed satisfaction with the way the VMDs worked. But as yet, the IEC has not given a proper account of exactly how many voters were disenfranchised as a result, or how this would have affected turnout or the results, if at all.
It appears from preliminary figures, announced at an IEC briefing shortly after election day, that 240,000 people filled in the required forms after their names didn’t appear on the voters roll. Of those, 100,000 apparently didn’t return to vote once the problem had been sorted out.
Issues around the devices are likely to have dealt a further blow to public trust in the IEC, which has already been declining. The commission consistently received more than two-thirds support among the voting-age population from 2001 until 2016, according to the Human Sciences Research Council’s "SA Social Attitudes Survey" and the Institute for Justice & Reconciliation’s Afrobarometer.
But by 2021 Afrobarometer showed only one in three citizens trusted the IEC.
While the surveys don’t show the reasons for the decline in trust, management issues, increased political contestation and attacks on the IEC, as well as court cases against it, might have contributed.
Former commission chair Pansy Tlakula resigned under a cloud in 2014 following a protracted legal battle to clear her name in relation to a lease deal, which she denied was corrupt.
Tlakula’s replacement, Glen Mashinini, worked as special projects adviser in former president Jacob Zuma’s office just before his appointment. His critics agreed that he ran the 2016 elections competently and that, in the run-up, he handled a Constitutional Court hearing related to a botched by-election in Tlokwe well. But his past close association with the national executive is still often mentioned in conversations with elections experts and opposition politicians.
It also means that EFF leader Julius Malema’s remarks in September — that the commission is "a branch of the ANC" — could permanently change public perceptions.
The DA, faced with the prospect of declining support, cast similar aspersions around the same time. Federal council chair Helen Zille implied on social media that the IEC conspired with the ANC when it reopened the candidate registration process. (Though the commission was concerned by the implication, it didn’t take action at the time. The DA took the matter to court and lost.)
This followed an unsuccessful application by the IEC to the Constitutional Court to have the elections postponed until next year, after former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke found that the pandemic could have an impact on the elections being free and fair. The court ordered that a new elections timetable should be worked out, and the IEC interpreted this as an opportunity to reopen candidate registrations. This gave the ANC a second chance to register a number of candidates after it failed to do so by the previous deadline.
ActionSA and its leader, Herman Mashaba, also lashed the IEC just ahead of the elections, for omitting the party’s abbreviated name on the ballot papers. The court found that ActionSA itself did not comply with the regulatory requirements when filling out the forms to register the party.
Terry Tselane, founder of the Institute of Election Management Services in Africa and former IEC deputy chair, says the IEC was ill-prepared for the elections. He also questions the commission’s legal advice on a number of issues, including reopening the candidate registration process and a pronouncement by IEC deputy chair Janet Love during a press briefing last week that exit polls are not allowed in SA.
"They are allowed, but the publication only during working hours is not allowed. It is this kind of misinterpretation of the law that makes the commission vulnerable to criticism, and it makes people think it is biased," Tselane says.
"The IEC has a lot of work to do to restore its image after these elections. I don’t like the narrative that it had 42 days to prepare for these elections. It had five years. It knew the term of a municipal councillor is five years."
However, IEC commissioner Nomsa Masuku says there are actually only about 2½ years between elections, as local and general elections alternate. That timeline is packed, and Covid compressed it further.
"Covid brought a level of uncertainty that we’ve never had to deal with before," she says. It also affected staff recruitment, the quality of training and the rollout of the VMDs.
The commission had hoped to test the VMDs during the voter registration weekend in July, which would have allowed enough time to iron out problems, but the level 4 lockdown meant that couldn’t happen.
Frontline IEC staff also didn’t have enough time "to get comfortable" using the machines, which also led to problems. For example, at Masuku’s voting station, the staff forgot to scan her ID. This would define the kind of experience the voter had at the point of service, she says.
"Despite training [and] WhatsApp [support] groups, when [election officials] were in panic mode, they were either embarrassed or didn’t remember to flip through the manual."
The voter management devices were supposed to make it easier to
guard against fraud
— What it means:
Masuku says she understands why people feel the voters roll is a mess. The shortened elections timeline did not allow for all the usual processes to run their full course, and this led to some of the problems.
"Suspicion is not difficult to provoke," she says. "People are very suspicious."
There were also the near-misses, such as printing ballot papers for each ward with its unique candidates amid scheduled power outages, and getting these to the right stations. "We literally hired people to go sit with the printer and make sure they do not mix up anything," she says.
Despite this, there was a mishap in Joburg and Ekurhuleni, where the name of the Active Movement for Change appeared alongside the logo of the Change Party on the ballot. The Change Party has accepted the IEC’s apology for the mistake.
But while perceptions are important, Masuku says the IEC doesn’t "agonise about managing [them]. We think the best way to manage perceptions is to just do your job well so you don’t have to run around explaining things to people."
Some perceptions are almost impossible to deal with head-on, she says, such as the perception — often expressed "on the streets of Twitter" — that black commissioners would be partial to the ANC.
"What you do to restore trust is run an election as best as you can," she says.
Grant Masterson of the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa, who has observed elections across the continent, says the more closely contested elections become, the more scrutiny the IEC will be subjected to.
"The IEC, even despite the challenges it has had for this election, remains an institution that South Africans should be rightly proud of," he says. "It’s a beacon of how to manage elections on the continent, despite the problems that it has had."
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