IEC to canvass door-to-door
2003-05-20 15:21
Cape Town - The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) will conduct door-to-door registrations in almost 5 000 voting districts ahead of next year's general election.
IEC chief electoral officer Pansy Tlakula told parliament's home affairs portfolio committee on Tuesday the targeted registration would be carried out over August and September this year.
This follows extensive changes to district voting boundaries since the last election.
An extra 1 867 districts had been added to the "voting map", taking the total to 16 855, while thousands of districts had been re-aligned.
The IEC was, therefore, obliged to conduct door-to-door registrations in about 4 789 districts.
"We want to ensure boundaries correspond to geographical and natural voting catchment districts."
She could not indicate how many voters would have to be targeted.
The number of voting stations across the country were also expected to rise.
Tlakula said by the end of April this year, there were about 18 million South Africans on the voters' roll, but it was only after the results of the national census were known that the IEC would have a clear indication of the expected number of voters.
Registration drives were scheduled for the first weekend of November and at the end of January next year.
The commission had about 16.2m REC 1 forms from the previous election registrations, which contained voters' personal details, but in only 3.5 million cases was a residential address included.
The commission had not been able to locate some 2,2-million of those forms.
"They were misplaced," she admitted.
Although the final decision on the date of the election rested with the Presidency, the IEC is provisionally planning for a poll around April next year.
- SAPA