Municipal elections will not be postponed: Van Rooyen
Postponing the local government elections was out of the question even if the Constitutional Court ruled that every name on the voters' roll should be accompanied by sufficient particulars of a voter's place of residence, Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Des van Rooyen said on Tuesday.
Briefing journalists ahead of his budget vote in Parliament, Van Rooyen and said the ministry would argue in the Constitutional Court case, set to take place on May 9, that the Electoral Court's decision that "sufficient particulars" of a person's place of residence should accompany their names on the voters' roll should be overturned.
"If we are to postpone elections, of course that will require a Constitutional amendment, so that's not an option," said van Rooyen.
"Definitely we are all worried that denying so many people to exercise that democratic right [to vote] is of great concern to us."
In February, the Electoral Court ruled that by-elections in various provinces be rerun afterward candidates in Tlokwe in the North West complained that not all names on the voters' roll were accompanied by addresses.
The Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) is appealing this decision in the Constitutional Court and is supported by Van Rooyen and his department.
Van Rooyen's deputy Andries Nel said about 12 million people did not have addresses or places of residence accompanying their names on the voters' roll for the local government elections and said correcting this could not be done "overnight".
He said they would argue that either the electoral court's decision should be overturned or the local government elections should go ahead while the IEC is given a few years to correct the situation.
"We can't directly or indirectly disenfranchise South Africans, especially the poorest of the poor, those that are most vulnerable."
Nel said the absence of an address next to a voter's name did not equate to fraud.
"The vast majority of people on the voters' roll who don't have addresses next to their names have been voting at that voting station for at least 10 years, so it's not some last-minute-trick to shift votes from here to there," said Nel.
He said given millions of South Africans did not have street addresses, they were considering geocoding.
"With regard to geocoding, that is one of the plan B scenarios that we developed in the event that the Constitutional Court upholds the Electoral Court judgment to say how can we, in the shortest time possible as government, provide South Africans with an address, not a formal address in the traditional sense, but some identifier that links their place of residence to a geographic coordinate system." - ANA