2019 Elections: The Disappeared – more than 15 million eligible voters will not vote on SA’s future By Ferial Haffajee ferialhaffajee
Let this sink in: almost one in three eligible voters in South Africa are either so disenchanted with politics or for whom democracy means so little in their daily lives that they did not turn up even to register. It could end up looking bleaker if you consider that the likely voter turnout is about 71% – which means that another five million people are not likely to turn out to vote.
The EFF’s biggest supporters are young city and town dwellers. Diego Iturralde, the chief director for demography at StatsSA, says “disenchanted youth are likely to reside in metropolitan areas and in urban metros rather than towns”. This is interesting because Gauteng is also the wealthiest province and the politically most sophisticated, but now also the province most turned off by formal politics. It has the highest levels of inequality which suggests that the Gini Coefficient is influencing political outcomes.
Who is not voting? Only 18.5% of first-time voters have registered to vote. StatsSA says there are 1.8 million young people between the ages of 18 and 19 years old eligible to vote, but only 341,186 of them have registered to vote.
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