Pretoria - Millions of young people have registered to vote in the upcoming elections, the Independent Electoral Commission said on Tuesday.
“We are thrilled with the way South Africans, and young South Africans in particular, have come out in their millions to take the opportunity to register,” chairwoman Pansy Tlakula said.
“The results show that we can lay to rest any suggestion that South Africans are apathetic or blasé about democracy.”
A total of 1,259,560 people registered for the first time over the weekend, taking the number to well over 25 million voters.
Tlakula said the number was 80.5 percent of the eligible voting population.
A total of 1.1 million people registered for the first time during the first registration weekend in November. With the 1.2m who registered this weekend a total of 2.3m voters would be added to the roll.
Almost three million people visited 22,263 voting stations over the weekend.
“That is 16 percent higher than the 2.5 million who visited voting stations in November,” said Tlakula.
Last Thursday the IEC said it hoped to improve on the figure of just over 24.1 million South Africans who had registered to vote.
This was 76.7 percent of the estimated voting age population which, according to Statistics SA, is 31.4 million. - Sapa