1 million KZN voters have incomplete addresses

IEC urges verifying registration and information at voting stations on Saturday and Sunday, or by going online. Picture: Courtney Africa/African News Agency (ANA)

IEC urges verifying registration and information at voting stations on Saturday and Sunday, or by going online. Picture: Courtney Africa/African News Agency (ANA)

Published Jan 23, 2019

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DURBAN - A million potential voters could be excluded from the next local government elections in KwaZulu-Natal unless they come forward and verify their addresses on the voters roll.

The push for voter registration addresses comes after the Constitutional Court in 2016 ruled that the IEC should obtain sufficient particulars of the location of voters by the end of June last year.

The IEC last year applied for, and was granted an extension by the Constitutional Court, for the final date to verify all addresses to be moved to after the 2019 national and provincial election.

IEC provincial electoral officer Mawethu Mosery said yesterday they would use this weekend’s voter registration to harvest addresses from registered voters whose addresses did not appear on the voters roll.

“As at the end of December 2018, a total of 1006330 voters on the KwaZulu-Natal segment of the voters roll had either an incomplete or no address on the voters roll.

“Of these, 298648 voters did not have addresses and 707682 had incomplete addresses. This is a significant drop from the 1812738 reported in March 2017, said Mosery.

He said this was due to the work of the IEC, in collaboration with other state entities and civil society organisations.

“The Constitutional Court gave us an extension until after the national and provincial elections so as not to destabilise the country and to give us an opportunity to capture these details. If we don’t obtain the details by the deadline, then those potential voters will be excluded from the 2021 elections.”

Mosery said the low number of first- time youth voters remained a concern and this was why they had focused their election campaign on young voters.

“Registration figures in the province show there are 5366520 registered voters. Of these, about 1336506 consist of youth between the ages of 18 to 29 years.

“One of our main concerns is the fact that only 170578 of registered young people are made up of first-time voters. The commission is working with various stakeholders to mobilise this category of young people to register for the coming elections.

“Consistent with previous elections statistics, women make a higher percentage of voters on the voters roll compared to men, currently sitting at 3034626, which equals 54%, in KZN.”

Mosery said all 4886 voting stations throughout the province would be open on Saturday and Sunday to assist potential voters to register, re-register, verify their registration status and to check or update their address details.

There are more than 5 million registered voters in the province.

SMS your ID number to 32810 to check your registration status.

Find out where your correct voting station is by visiting the VS Finder page on the IEC’s website, www.elections.org.za.

- THE MERCURY 

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