IEC asks Parliament to keep the electoral bill alive, and says its biggest changes only bite after November 4

The Electoral Laws Amendment Bill will not be law by the time South Africans vote on November 4, and the Independent Electoral Commission has told Parliament it should keep working on it anyway.

As IOL reported on 23 September, the commission briefed the home affairs portfolio committee on the bill and on what its absence means for the municipal elections. Deputy chief electoral officer Masego Sheburi set out the provisions and where they would land. His answer to the timing question was that the changes become more useful after the poll than during it, because they deal with by-elections and with elections still to come.

The bill amends three laws at once: the Electoral Commission Act, the Electoral Act and the Municipal Electoral Act. It was drafted in preparation for the November 4 local government elections. That is the date that has now passed it by.

Committee chairperson Mosa Chabane said the timeframe was too tight to consider the bill before the elections and that the committee would subject it to public participation for comment. That is the route the bill now takes.

Sheburi told MPs that a party that is registered but holds no seats in a council, a legislature or Parliament would have to renew its registration every year. A party that misses the cut-off would fall off the register automatically. He said the change would spare the commission the cost and the litigation of defending deregistration decisions it currently has to make itself, and described the target as shelf parties that have gone quiet. Where a party does give notice that it still exists, he said, the commission will not touch its registration.

On the Electoral Court, the bill would increase the number of judges and allow the court to sit in more than one session to work through its caseload. It also proposes that the Judge President, in consultation with the Minister of Justice, compile a list of additional members drawn from people who are not judges but have relevant experience.

That last provision drew the sharpest questions of the briefing. MPs asked why the Judicial Services Commission had been left out of recommending those non-judge members. Advocate Moses Malakate, a legal advisor in the home affairs department, said the department had noted the removal of the JSC’s role and would look for the reason and rationale behind it.

MPs also asked how unrepresented parties would be held accountable for their funding. Sheburi pointed to the Political Party Funding Act, which already requires parties to account for money received and requires donors to disclose.

Two further changes are technical but will be felt by anyone who deals with the commission. The bill removes registered post and telegrams as ways of serving notices, leaving electronic mail and personal service. And it would require voters registering to give sufficient detail of where they ordinarily live, while setting out how privacy rights and personal information apply to the voters roll.

Sheburi called the voters roll change the most consequential in the bill. Objections would be limited to the provisionally compiled roll. Once the objection period lapses and the roll is certified, it can be used for an election. He said the amendment does not take away anyone’s ability to object, but it does close off objections on election day.

The bill also sets a cut-off for party registration and participation. Only parties whose registration is final on the day of proclamation can nominate candidates. Once a party is registered, there is a 30-day window for objections.

IEC chairperson Mosotho Moepya put the principle plainly: the commission wants the Act to ensure that deregistration happens by application of the law.

For an ordinary voter, none of this changes the ballot on November 4. The roll is certified, the parties that are on it are on it, and the objections that were going to be heard have been heard. What changes is what happens next: to the small parties that hold no seats and must now prove every year that they still exist, to the Electoral Court as it works through a growing caseload, and to anyone who registers to vote after the bill passes and finds that the address they give carries a defined set of privacy rules.

The committee’s next step is public participation. No date for that process has been given.

Source: IOL, Electoral bill may have greater impact after November municipal elections, IEC says