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Nine million eligible voters not registered
Pretoria- At least nine million South Africans who are eligible to vote are not registered, the Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) said on Thursday. The IEC hoped that at least one million of them would register over the weekend to vote in this year's local government elections, CEO Mosotho Moepya told reporters on Thursday.Almost one in three unregistered voters lived in Gauteng.
“Based on the latest voting age population estimates provided by Statistics South Africa, there are currently approximately 34m South African citizens of voting age, placing the current registration level at 73% of all eligible voters.”
Of the 9m eligible voters not currently registered, about 1.5m (16%) were aged 18-19, 4.3m (46%) were aged 20-29, 1.6m (18%) aged 30-39, 0.8m (9%) aged 40-49, and 1m (11%) were over 50.
Gauteng had the highest number of registered voters with nearly 6m, followed by KwaZulu-Natal with just over 5m.
The Eastern Cape had 3.1m, the Western Cape 2.9m, Limpopo 2.4m, Mpumalanga 1.8m, North West 1. 6m, Free State 1.4m, and Northern Cape 584 830. Moepya called on South Africans to come out in their numbers to register. They were confident that everything was in place for the process to run smoothly and efficiently. There would be over 10m registration forms, 33 000 “zip-zip” machines to scan the barcodes in ID documents, and 52 000 staff to help voters.
News24
