Budget cuts hindered voter education of more complex voting process

The queue to vote at CBC St John’s in Parklands, Cape Town, was the length of three soccer fields on Wednesday (Peter Luhanga /GroundUp)

• The IEC has faced budget cuts in a more complex voting environment 
• The voter education budget, which was not large, was cut by about 10%
• This despite changes to the Electoral Act.
• For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.

Successive budget cuts over the past four years appear to have played a role in the Electoral Commission of SA’s (IEC) ability to run Wednesday’s general elections, but it was the longer and more complicated voting process legislated by Parliament that caused chaos at a large number of voting stations. 

The IEC’s budget has been shrinking, along with fiscal constraints across government.

Spending was cut by R270 billion from 2019/29 to 2026/27. The budget for 2024/25 was cut by R31m from the amount that had been pencilled into the medium-term budget framework a year earlier, despite 2024 being an election year. However, it followed a R250-million budget cut in the previous medium-term budget cycle.

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The cuts came after Parliament legislated a new and cumbersome voting process in 2021 that demanded stronger voter education effort.

The changes to electoral law—necessitated by an instruction from the Constitutional Court to allow independent candidates to contest—led to the introduction of a three-ballot system. 

The long queues at voting stations resulted from the longer voting process with the third ballot and a longer ballot paper due to the proliferation of parties. Machines, which provided a further reconciliation tool for voting but were not essential to the integrity of the elections, were also unreliable.

While the ANC, which drove the new voting model through Parliament, was warned about the complexity that would result, it was adamant that it would not consider any other proposal for electoral reform. 

In the 2024/25 budget year, the IEC’s outreach budget of R237 million was cut by R21m from the previous year’s estimate, indicating that voter education incurred the largest portion of the R30-million budget cut.  

Asked whether the IEC had done enough to educate voters on the changes to the Electoral Act, IEC chief electroal officer Sy Mamabolo said that the IEC had done what it could with its budget and had fully expended its outreach budget.