South Africans residing abroad will now have the opportunity to register online for the first time, marking a significant shift from the previous process that required physical visits to South African diplomatic missions, often located far from their places of residence. In 2019, this traditional approach resulted in just 31,000 registrations. Online registration is set to begin on October 24, 2023 for the country’s crucial 2024 national and provincial elections. In an interview with BizNews, the DA Abroad, Ludré Stevens described the new rules as ‘game-changing.’ The party is now on a mission to register 200,000 South Africans living abroad for the 2024 elections. Additionally, the DA is actively pressuring the Department of International Relations and Cooperation to designate 13 additional voting stations in areas with a substantial South African expatriate population, including Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Wellington, Austin, Edinburgh, and Belfast. Stevens emphasised the importance of South Africans abroad making use of these new registration rules, as this could be the first domino in prompting further changes. The party’s primary objective, he said, is to secure the election of two Members of Parliament through overseas votes, a critical potential outcome if coalitions become prevalent after the 2024 elections. – Linda van Tilburg
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Relevant timestamps from the interview
00:09 – Introductions
00:32 – Ludre Stevens on the official date to register overseas
01;02 – How much easier has it become to register
03:07 – What to do when you’re a brand new voter
04:30 – What you need to be able to register
06:13 – Where can you vote
08:26 – The different venues for voting
09:36 – Voting stations in the US
10:41 – Lobbying to the IEC and Dirco
12:11 – How many people are voting overseas
14:07 – Final message to South Africans
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Excerpts from the Interview
Online voting for overseas voters is game-changing
So, this is the first time ever that we’ll have online registration for overseas voters because previously you could only go and register to vote at the embassies in person around the world. So, that meant we had loads of physical barriers from registering. Now, we can do online voter registration, and this is game-changing. There are a few reasons why you have to go register. The first thing is you cannot vote if you are not registered. It’s as simple as that.
So if you don’t register, the battle is lost already. Number one, you cannot vote without registering. Number two, we’re now in the age of coalition politics in South Africa. So, we’ve seen in the last two years and a bit with the various coalitions in SA, you either have stable coalitions run by the DA and its coalition partners where it’s based on principles and values, or you have coalitions of corruption where the various other parties do horse trading and just run the cities into the ground. Often, with a majority of one council and one seat, you are able to form a stable coalition, or not. The way that our politics works with proportional representation is that every member of parliament seats represents about 50,000 votes, and for 34,000 votes, it is rounded up to a full MP. That means suddenly with one seat, we form a coalition that is stable and gets our country out of this mess of streets exploding, corruption, cadre deployment, and load shedding. So, we can now register to vote online overseas. Why wouldn’t we do that? Why would we just grab the opportunity and be part of that solution?
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Three scenarios for overseas voting
The first one is when you are a brand-new voter. So I’ve just turned 18, you’re a South African citizen and live overseas, or you’ve never voted before and you want to vote this time. It’s a brand-new registration. The second scenario is when you are on a voter’s roll, and you want to change it to an overseas mission. So, you have previously registered in South Africa, and you want to move it to the overseas mission or you’ve moved from Australia to London and want to update your voting location. The third scenario is a temporary overseas vote. You want to keep your voting station in South Africa, but you’re going to be overseas for work, a holiday, or visiting family, and you want to vote then. This is called the VEC10 process.
The first two scenarios can be done when they go live on the 24th of October. As for the third scenario, you’ll be able to do it a certain number of weeks just before the election. If people follow us on the DA abroad website or the DA website and sign up for our alerts, we will inform them about how to register, when to register, when to send the VEC10 forms, and answer any questions. All three scenarios, which include new registrations, changes of voting stations, and temporary overseas voting stations, will be available through the same service.
Voters abroad need a passport and ID to vote, DA will help smooth the process
Unfortunately, right now the Independent Electoral Commission, IEC requires that you have to have a valid passport and an ID book or smart card. We are going to try and fight this a bit more, but as it stands right now, you have to have both. Now we understand that South Africans living overseas don’t always have both, and many people have had numerous issues trying to renew their passports with just ridiculous turnaround times.
So, we’re asking people to do three things. One is, if you’re going to South Africa for Christmas in December or a day, please go and renew your passport and ID while in South Africa. It takes five days, and it’s a fast service; please just do it there. However, if you’re not going to South Africa between now and the end of the registration period or the election period, then just contact your local embassy or consulate service and apply for it now.
Thirdly, if you have any problems, if you’ve been waiting for a long time, or the embassy doesn’t respond to you, or if the turnaround time is just too long, please contact us, the DA Abroad, at [email protected]. We have an escalation service that we use to highlight those issues with the Department of Home Affairs. I know it might seem like a hassle to have your passport and ID, and it might feel like an insurmountable administrative task if you don’t have one or the other. But the fact is this: you cannot register if you don’t have both. If you can’t vote, you can’t register. So, please apply for the ID and passport. There are three processes: Renew in South Africa when you get there, contact your embassy right now, or please contact us, and we’ll assist you if there are problems with the local embassy.
DA pushing DIRCO for another 13 overseas voting stations
The IEC has to follow the Electoral Act, and the Electoral Act states that you can only vote at foreign missions. These are embassies, consulate services, and high commissions. The Department for International Relations and Cooperation, DIRCO, is responsible for designating overseas missions. The DA is launching a campaign to request DIRCO to designate additional overseas voting stations.
In 2019, the IEC made 125 voting stations available overseas. Our best estimate is that we need another 13 to cater to the high-density South African locations around the world. So instead of having 125, we are aiming for 138. This doesn’t break the bank or create logistical barriers like before. The only difference is that DIRCO has to designate additional sites.
We are launching an official process through parliamentary procedures, and if that doesn’t work, we will go to the courts to request more voting stations. They cannot deny us our voting rights when they have provided 125 other locations with low-density South African populations voting rights. Why not these other 13 missions.
People know the DA by now.We’ve had an eight-year court battle against Home Affairs to help people who lost their South African citizenship regain it. Those people lost it automatically. It took us eight years, but we got there. So, there’s a well-trodden road for us to fight for what is right. While the IEC may say they can’t make more voting stations available, it’s not up to them, but we will work to get DIRCO to designate more sites so that the IEC can have more voting stations overseas.
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Register to vote: Empower the DA’s efforts to expand voting stations
In Australia, the capital city of the country is Canberra, and the embassy is located there. So, in Australia, in the old way of doing things, you would have had to fly from Perth to Canberra or fly from Sydney to Canberra. We are now going to push for voting stations in Perth, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Melbourne, in addition to Canberra. The same thing applies to New Zealand; currently, you can only vote in Wellington. We are going to push for Christchurch and Auckland as well. The same is happening in Canada; we’re pushing for more voting stations. The same in the UK, not just in London, but also in Belfast, Manchester, and Edinburgh. All these places have South Africans, and we are now being denied the ability to vote because of this. However, we need people to register overseas because those registrations will make our case easier to get more voting stations. So no matter what you do, even if there isn’t currently a voting station nearby, please just register because that’s the first step in us being able to get more voting stations ideally closer to where South Africans live.
So in 2019 in the US you could vote in Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. But we have people reaching out to us from Austin Texas and several other places. So, wherever there are certain volumes of people, we will push for voting stations.
DA will go to court if lobbying and Parliamentary process does not work
The way it works is that the ICE can only implement what the law says; the laws are dictated by the Electoral Act unless there are court orders that override the Electoral Act at that point. The courts do not favour people going to court and overriding the parliamentary process; they frown upon it if you skip a step. So, our first step is to engage with DIRCO through our shadow minister for foreign relations to request them to designate these overseas foreign missions. We hope they comply. If they don’t, we will then attempt to navigate the parliamentary process of changing the Electoral Act, though there isn’t much time left. Only then will we consider pursuing a court case. But we can only initiate the court case after we’ve completed both steps one and two. Step one involves requesting DIRCO to make this designation. If they say yes, then they have to declare those places as voting stations and then nothing else needs to change because the IEC can simply use those foreign missions as voting stations. However, if DIRCO doesn’t cooperate, then we will have to compel them to do so.
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DA’s goal: Register 200,000 overseas voters
Census data is really skewed, and every country has a different way of asking questions, depending on where you were born, where you go to university or what your nationality is. So, you can’t rely on census data. We have used a variety of sources and reached a point where, while there’s no direct number of how many people are overseas, we know where the majority of South Africans are. Our target is to get 200,000 people registered online. In 2019, only 31,000 people were registered, so we aim for 200,000 because we’ve transitioned from a physical process to an online process. From that point, it’s all about voter turnout because unfortunately, voting is still in person, not online or by any other method. Our primary step is to ensure we can be registered.
If we achieve 200,000 registered people, we can use those numbers to secure more voting stations in the areas where those people are registered. Ultimately, we want to increase the number of voting stations from 125 to at least 138, and potentially more if we find that there are people in locations we didn’t initially budget for.
Of these 200,000 people we aim to register, our goal is to secure 100,000 DA votes. Depending on the election turnout and the 400 seats in parliament, for example, if 20 million people turn out to vote, it means that 50,000 people equal one MP. So, our objective is to get two MPs elected to parliament through the overseas vote, totalling 100,000 votes.
However, the critical number is 200,000 registrations. That’s where we begin. Without these registrations, we can’t achieve anything. Step number one, everyone, is to register online.
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