Africa-Press – South-Africa. The Electoral Commission of SA (IEC) has warned that the ongoing fiscal challenges could limit registration opportunities for the 2026 local government elections and potentially give South Africans only one chance to register.
Chief electoral officer Sy Mamabolo said on Thursday the IEC expected the registration weekend to be in June 2026. However, he noted there was no guarantee there would be a second chance to register.
“The reason for that is financial. We are in discussion with the National Treasury so it may well be that ahead of the elections there may be one general registration weekend,” he said. “Our preference is two but we all know the fiscal position of the country.”
Mamabolo was part of the IEC delegation that addressed members of the KwaZulu-Natal legislature in Pietermaritzburg on the opening day of its multi-stakeholder engagement in the province.
He confirmed that electronic voting will not be implemented next year, although there were policy discussions about using it in the future.
The commission added that it was taking steps to prevent a repeat of the technical problems it experienced in the 2024 elections but reiterated that its systems were not compromised and the national elections maintained their integrity despite those setbacks.
Mamabolo said the 2024 elections were relatively peaceful in comparison to past elections, despite being the most competitive and witnessing a significant increase in tension and legal disputes.
“The commission had to defend no less than 80 applications in various courts but we have to compliment the fact that the prevailing environment was fairly peaceful in comparison with previous iterations of elections.”
The complaints came mostly from the technical challenges the commission experienced, mainly the functioning of the voter management devices (VMDs) in the voting stations and the “crash” of its results dashboard.
The IEC had in 2024 introduced, for the first time, independent candidates as part of the evolving electoral framework.
However, Mamabolo reiterated that their ICT system was not hacked and the elections met the international standards of free and fairness, despite those challenges.
The IEC’s elections results dashboard was infamously interrupted during the counting of the national and provincial votes.
Addressing the interruption of the election results dashboard, Mamabolo reiterated that the results were secured.
Mamabolo also reflected on the “suboptimal” performance of the VMDs on election day last year, saying the commission was also unhappy because it led to long queues and created a lot of of consternation at voting stations
He said there were five applications (apps) that were operational in the VMDs but one of them, the voters roll app, experienced a glitch that caused it to the create multiple records for a single voter when their ID was scanned, instead of capturing a single record and sending it through the network.
“As that one transaction replicated over many times, sometimes as many as 20,000 times, it created a backlog between the local machine and our application pulls in the network.”
He said the IEC has put measures in place to prevent future problems as they prepare for the 2026 elections.
“We have identified that problem, ameliorated it and, at the moment, we are procuring an external independent tester to test the application from the code itself — its transmission to the network — and we should be able to give the executive summary of that testing to political parties in the party liaison committee so that you can be assured that the testing has happened by an independent company and what the outcome is.”
He urged political parties to work on their candidates’ lists early because the commission cannot extend the cut-off date.
“The courts have repeatedly said the IEC can’t unilaterally change the date of the election timetable so when the date for submission of candidates list is set, it can’t be changed unless there is a tsunami or similar natural disaster. Parties must work on that with a view to around June/July [2026].”
The proclamation date is expected to be around July from co-operative governance and traditional affairs minister Velenkosini Hlabisa.
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