The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), since last Monday, has received more than 10 000 applications from voters who want to cast special votes and those who will be unable to vote at voting stations at which they are registered.
The electoral body opened the window for the applications on Monday and voters have until May 17 to apply.
Speaking at the signing of the Electoral Code of Conduct Pledge at Athlone in Cape Town, electoral matters manager Belinda Mbeleni said voters were allowed to notify the commission of their intention to vote elsewhere if they could not do so at their registered voting stations.
“As an example, if you are deployed and assist with an election and you will not be close to the voting station where you are ordinarily registered, you inform us of your intention to vote elsewhere.
“That system was made available on 15 March until 17 May,” Mbeleni said in reference to what is known as a Section 24A vote.
She said they had received 8 042 applications for the national ballot and 4 902 applications for regional and provincial ballots respectively in the Western Cape since last Monday.
Mbeleni also said they had received about 5 700 applications for home visits.
“We received 9 262 applications for special votes at our various voting stations within the last three days,” she added.
Mbeleni said they knew that the special votes were intended to assist voters who were infirm, but the system had been abused or misused.
“We communicated this to the provincial liaison committee that the IEC will not accept any manual submission of applications unless it is on a spreadsheet and we are able to account for each form that has been submitted.”
“Those forms will only be accepted in that format,” she said.
Mbeleni said people used to submit a box filled with application forms and those not visited would claim to have submitted forms to the IEC, but they would have no record of that.
Commissioner Janet Love said voters should remember to vote at voting stations where they are registered.
“Tell people that if they don’t tell us in advance by 17 May that they want to vote somewhere else, you will vote where you registered, otherwise you miss the bus,” Love said.
Mbeleni said preparations for the election in the Western Cape were at an advanced stage.
There were 1572 confirmed voting stations.
Training was under way for the deputy presiding officers and the rest of the voting station staff.
“Training started in March. We will continue until the end of May,” Mbeleni said.
She also said that the voting management devices had been maintained after the voter registration weekend.
Mbeleni said they had distributed the bulk of the material to all their 36 storage sites in the province.
The State Security Agency has assisted with the assessment of the storage facilities, offices and counting sites, among others.
Mbeleni added that they were in constant liaison with Eskom and that they were in process of procuring mobile lights to be used at voting stations during the counting of ballots.
“Each of our voting stations will have lighting ... lamps should there be, in case there is load shedding. We have even gone further to ensure that our offices and capturing sites also have generators. We are in the process of hiring the generators.
“The only challenge is that we don’t own the buildings. We need to make sure that we have approval from our various landlords,” Mbeleni said.
Cape Times