Africa-Press – South-Africa. The DA has bemoaned the ANC’s recommendation of Glen Mashinini for the position of Electoral Commissioner without undertaking public consultations.
According to the DA, Mashinini was the reason behind only 12.3 million South Africans having voted in the 2022 local government elections despite there having been 26.1 million voters registered for those elections.
DA spokesperson on Home Affairs, Angel Khanyile, said: “The vote by the ANC to recommend Glen Mashinini as an Electoral Commissioner is a slap in the face of every South African who was denied their right to vote in the 2021 Local Government Elections (LGE).”
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Khanyile also credited Mashinini with the Electoral Commission of South Africa’s (IEC) failure in its report on the 2021 local government elections to the portfolio committee on Home Affairs last month to even mention voter management device failures as a challenge faced by the IEC, despite numerous voting wards citing them as being behind server delays and the inability of some voters to cast their ballots.
“Failures in these systems resulted in around 140 000 voters who had changed their registration, finding they had in fact not been changed and being unable to vote on election day. A huge number of first-time voters were turned away on election day as their details did not appear on the voters roll.”
Khanyile said:
The IEC admitted it first tested the devices on registration weekend, despite insisting before the elections that the devices had been tested and a backup process was in place.
On Tuesday, it came down to a vote in Parliament’s Home Affairs committee, leading to the majority ANC successfully recommending Mashinini to fill the vacancy that arose as his contract had expired in April.
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The DA objected to this recommendation, while the EFF abstained from the vote. The EFF requested its objection also be noted in the report that would go to the House. The IFP did not attend the meeting.
Mashinini was initially appointed as IEC chairperson by then-president Jacob Zuma in April 2015.
Opposition parties harshly criticised Mashinini following the past few elections, saying under his watch, that the IEC had failed in its most basic task – to manage voter registration and the election in such a way that every person entitled to be registered and vote was able to do so.
This followed the washable ink debacle in the 2019 national and provincial elections and the faulty voter mechanism in the 2021 local government elections.
The DA said the ANC’s decision “sought to ignore the unfair elections we have been subjected to”.
“We have witnessed a number of complaints regarding [the] IEC’s conduct during every election, and our pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
“Further to that, the voter turnout keeps decreasing. This clearly indicates that the IEC has no plan to encourage young people to vote,” said Khanyile.
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