Question NW1175 to the Minister of Home Affairs

Reply:

(1) The Electoral Commission did not keep a record of the number of valid

physical addresses on the final voters’ roll for the local government elections in 2001, 2006 and 2011.

(2) The Electoral Commission did not keep a record of the number of valid physical addresses on the final voters’ roll for the provincial and national elections in 2004, 2009 and 2014 elections. Following the Constitutional Court judgment in Kham on 30 November 2015, the Electoral Commission for the first time ahead of both registration weekend held in March and April 2016, produced a voters’ roll with addresses and requested registered voters to confirm or correct their address details on the voters’ roll. Following the last voter registration weekend in April 2016 the status of addresses on the voters’ roll is as follows on the table below:

Category	Number of Voters Affected
Voters with Addresses and REC AS	14,174,525
Potentially Incomplete Addresses	6,635,458
No Addresses	5,491,430
Grand Total	26,301,413

The different categories used in the table are as follows:

(a-b) The “complete addresses” category includes only those voters who have a complete conventional urban address with at least the following four line-items: street number, street name, suburb and town. The reason this category is defined in such narrow terms is because only addresses that meet all four of these requirements is definitely a complete address. It is accordingly the only assumption that can be fed into the database to obtain a definite figure of complete addresses. However, in response to the Kham Judgment, this category also included recent transaction during the Reg 1 and Reg 2 weekends and the category was expanded to include those who had submitted sufficient particulars in terms of the REC AS forms.

The “no addresses” category includes voters in respect of whom no physical residential address is captured. This includes: (i) voters whose Rec 1 forms have been lost; (ii) voters who have left the address section in the Rec 1 form blank or have indicated that they have no formal residential address (e.g. by writing the words “N/A” or “none” in the address section); and (iii) voters who have provided only a postal address.

The “potentially incomplete addresses” category is all the remaining addresses. Many, and possibly the vast majority, of these addresses are complete for the purposes of s 16(3). But it is impossible to determine whether they are complete by making general assumptions (for input into the database) without examining these addresses individually.

(3) As the records of the number of valid addresses were not kept it is impossible to make a determination of a reduction or increase. However since the decision of the Constitutional Court in Kham over 4 million addresses and sufficient particularities have been obtain from voters.

(4) Some REC 1 forms have been lost over the years as a result of mishaps and unexpected events – with REC 1 forms being lost in transit (as they move from voting/counting stations to local IEC offices to provincial warehouses) or damaged in storage. The IEC has not kept a catalogue of these incidents. Some of the incidents include the following:

(a) During 2001, flooding at a warehouse used by the IEC for storage of some of its records in eThekwini metropolitan municipality, KwaZulu-Natal destroyed a number of REC 1 forms dated 1998 and 1999.

(b)(i-ii) In Msinga local municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, the REC1 forms for the period 1998 to 2008 were erroneously discarded by a removal company when the IEC vacated a rented storage facility. This was discovered during the 2010/2011 bulk scanning project.

- A fire broke out at a Metrofile (Pty) Ltd warehouse in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal province on the night of 11 October 2013, where the IEC stored some of its records. This fire did not, however, result in any loss of voter data as the REC 1 forms destroyed in the fire had already been scanned and captured.

- On 15 November 2013, about 1,500 REC 1 forms were destroyed by fire during the unrest in the Metsimaholo Municipality, Free State.

- The Sol Plaatjie municipal electoral office in the Northern Cape was flooded in February 2014. This resulted in the loss of approximately 15,000 REC 1 forms.

- In March 2015, 3,900 REC 1 forms were destroyed by fire during community protests in the Mantsopa Municipality in the Free State.