GWEN NGWENYA | It’s time SA moved to an automatic voters’ roll

There  are  now  over 13 million South Africans of voting age, who are not registered to vote. If past voter registration drives are anything to go by, t he IEC  may spend up to  R419 million  per registration drive  ahead of the local government elections in November ,  in the hope to add  a portion of the  eligible but  currently  unregistered  pool of South Africans to the voters roll.  Automatic registration offers a better way . Technologically, South Africa is already most of the way there. And frankly,  it should be part of  a  wider conversation on automatic enrolment  in other areas such as retirement savings. 

At present, South Africans who have never voted before need to register  to vote . This process has been made easier  in recent years with  the introduction of  online registration .  However, it still has not been enough to bring mostly young, unemployed South Africans into the fold.  If  only 3% of the previously unregistered voted,  this would add approximately 390 000 additional voters to the voters’ roll.  Distributed across the metros proportionally to their share of the registered electorate, each major metro might see somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 additional votes.

It’s not obvious who the immediate beneficiary would be of such an intervention. The latest market research from  Ipsos shows that at a national level, political party support doesn’t vary significantly whether you look at registered voters or the overall eligible voter population. However, in places where margins are narrow between the largest party and the second largest, an increase of just 50 000 voters makes a big difference. It would all depend on which newly registered voters turn up on election day- with urban voters more likely to make that choice. 

In Tshwane, t he ANC won 466,041 votes (34.63%), with the  2nd  largest in terms of votes, the  DA on 431,042 votes (32.03%) . This is  a gap of 34,999 votes.  Similarly, in Nelson Mandela Bay the  DA  won  39.92%,  and the  ANC 39.43% ;  a margin of less than half a percentage point.   In absolute terms, based on total votes cast in that metro, that translates to a gap of roughly 1,900 votes.   If automatic registration delivered only a small fraction of new voters and no major change nationally, it could nonetheless have an outsized impact on the political future of some municipal councils. 

Parliament is  due to consider a  bill to introduce a 1% electoral threshold for municipal representation . This is  a supply-side fix designed to reduce the kingmaker power of parties that, in a city like Johannesburg, may represent a few thousand voters. Automatic registration addresses the same problem from the demand side: rather than limiting who can govern with a handful of votes, it expands the pool of voters making the choice in the first place. A more complete electorate is more likely to produce the clearer mandates that make the threshold bill unnecessary.  It’s by far the more democratic way to address unclear mandates, and at the least should be the first option explored.

Technologically, we have and  continue to  build  out the  digital infrastructure to make this a reality. Ideally the country needs two things :  digital identity verification as well as address verification. 

SA has invested heavily in a sophisticated national identity infrastructure . Recent upgrades to the digital verification system will further improve the ability across government departments to confirm identities against the National Population Register and ensure a more fraud proof digital identity supported by biographic and biometric data.   What remains is the ability to assign someone to a ward without a reliable address.  MzansiXchange ,  a pilot project launched in October 2025 , facilitates  real-time  information  verification between government departments, enabling   streamlined digital government services.”   Making it the prime option to fill this gap.  The address data that SASSA holds for grant recipients  is  one of South  Africa 's most comprehensive address databases for lower-income citizens . This data  could in principle flow through  MzansiXchange  to the IEC to assign ward addresses.  This can be complimented too by SARS data, which holds address data for taxpayers. 

The unregistered 13 million voting-age adults are overwhelmingly young, urban, and lower-income . If t he electorate is structurally skewed before a single ballot is cast , it  minimises  their share of voice in policy priorities . Leaving aside whose fault that is, it’s difficult to imagine how this could not be a source of rising resentment, feeding a breeding ground  of support for populists and authoritarians . Auto- enrolment may very well be both the democratically principled and pragmatic choice to avoid political instability.

Ngwenya chairs the American Chamber of Commerce (South Africa) Policy Forum. She writes in her personal capacity.