ANTHONY BUTLER | Cajoling reluctant voters will not help, so what will?

Election participation rates in SA have plunged, so automatic voter registration is a good place to start

First published in Business Day

October 29, 2026

As the local government polls draw near, widespread concern has been expressed about declining voter turnout in SA’s elections. At national level, the turnout of registered electors has fallen from almost 90% in 1999 to less than 60% in 2024, and local level participation has been lower still.

Political scientists initially explained this drop in terms of the one-party dominance of the African National Congress (ANC), which made outcomes appear inevitable. In our increasingly competitive environment, they have turned to indications of widespread democratic discontent or posited “cross-pressured” ANC partisans who have increasingly chosen abstention over voting for opposition parties.

Surveys show a majority of citizens are dissatisfied with how democracy and public service delivery function together, while younger cohorts exhibit significantly lower participation rates alongside lower formal party identification.

Looking beyond the turnout of registered voters, by considering the proportion of the entire eligible voting age population (VAP) that votes, the problem becomes even more striking.

In the 2024 elections, the eligible VAP was 40 million citizens, of whom only 28 million were registered. This left 12.6 million unregistered citizens who simply could not vote on the day, whatever their last-minute wishes might have been.

The registration challenge probably has several causes. Millions of eligible citizens are unregistered because of procedural hurdles, or the fact that they are mobile and so are not registered in the places they would currently have to vote.

The low turnout of the entire VAP undermines the legitimacy of democratic elections. After all, in 2024 only around 17% of eligible electors voted for the ANC, a party that still dominates national government.

Working out what to do about the turnout challenge is not straightforward. It is lazy to attribute declining registration and turnout to “voter apathy”. Voters who identify with the ANC but blame it for worsening national economic conditions experience emotional pain and cognitive dissonance rather than apathy. Citizens in the ideological middle of this conservative country see few pertinent differences between candidate platforms.

Unregistered youth face high registration and participation costs relative to perceived political efficacy which makes non-participation rational. It is, after all, more likely that any of us will be run over on the way to the polling station, than that our vote will make any difference to the outcome.

Among registered voters, abstention is often driven by a decay in participation by like-minded peers and neighbours. As the turnout of these “co-supporters” drops, the moral obligation of “playing one’s part” erodes, amplifying turnout declines across successive election cycles.

All this suggests that cajoling apathetic citizens to turn out, or running civic education workshops and social media campaigns,  will do little to break the habit of non-voting. Reversing the historic drop in participation will require far deeper interventions.

Transitioning from opt-in registration to automatic voter registration – perhaps with an opt-out choice – could be accomplished using smart identity card databases. This would immediately bring the 13 million unregistered citizens into play

Addressing procedural bottlenecks, such as voting district notification rules, voter management device glitches, long queues, and electoral budget cuts, would prevent voters from being repeatedly discouraged on election day.

Implementing early voting days and expanded special voting could lower physical and financial costs for mobile urban citizens and students.

Replacing the closed-list proportional representation system with a mixed-member proportional system – a proposal that brings its own problems — might bring direct line-of-sight accountability between voters and local MPs, increasing citizens’ belief that their vote matters.

The parties also need to up their game. Former ANC voters frequently abstain rather than defect because other parties lack credibility or rely too heavily on negative rhetoric alone. Such parties need to present viable, long-term policy solutions that offer voters a persuasive alternative.

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town