Back in May, I worked for a now-defunct Taxpayers’ Union organisation for two weeks. I wrote several articles for them which were never published. I feel they are still relevant today, and hope you find them interesting.
Using the coronavirus lockdown policies as an irrational excuse, the IEC has approached the courts to postpone eight by-elections. Eight by-elections may not seem significant on a national level, but it is significant for those municipalities who will be impacted by the removal of their citizens’ rights to recall officials of whom they do not approve. And it will furthermore establish a precedent by which the arbitrary postponement of elections by means of emergency legislation becomes common practice.
And it is indeed arbitrary. Last year’s cartoonish, rapidly changing and contradictory regulations aside, we still face hypocritical, irrational and ineffective public health policies. While taxis are still allowed to operate at maximum capacity, and public enforcement of various other pandemic containment policies is virtually non-existent, public officials are still intent on using the current public health policies as an excuse to ram through favourable changes.
The changes to public procurement during lockdown have created the most shameless public service looting spree in our country’s history, and the expansion of the powers of the police and military have led to enormous violations of civil liberties and basic human rights while enforcement of basic and vital laws against theft and violence have gone unchecked. The squatters rights changes during this period has seen a permanent solidification of the largest wave of land grabs for decades.
Recently, the courts have forced the government to implement reforms which are not in the ruling party (or indeed any established party)’s favour, seeing as they forced the state to accept candidates not belonging to any political party. The government have until June 2022 to get reforms passed, but this also offers a mandate for the ruling party to change what it sees fit at a time when they are in trouble at the ballot box.
Electoral support for the ANC finally sees significant decline, and unsurprisingly, the party began declaring its intent to postpone the elections. In professional accounts, the ANC is destined for an electoral loss, forced to form a coalition in 2024 with rising firebrands in the EFF or economic-liberal reformers in the DA to achieve a majority. To stave off this inevitable defeat, the ANC will have to change the rules. And that is precisely what they aim to do.Of course, proposals by Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Moaletsi and his ministerial committee are already late, considering the usual 2 year timeline for legislation to be passed, having been in conference for over a year.
But while serious reforms are late in coming, from last year already, the ruling party and its ideological allies the EFF voiced their support for a total scrapping of the 2021 municipal elections, instead incorporating them into the 2024 national election. This, they will be aware, is illegal under the constitution, which demands that municipal office holders are limited to only five years in office, with 90 days of leeway for elections to be held after their term is expired.
Worse, many MPs, in cooperation with DA reject Mmusi Maimane and tiny ANC splinter party COPE, embarked last year on an ambitious attempt to electoral reform with the Electoral Laws Amendment Bill of 2020, a long list of suggestions which function to radically undermine representation and electoral security. One of the suggestions is to further limit representative seats in favour of UK-style first-past-the-post district voting, which shuts out small parties by turning voting pluralities into parliamentary majorities, and turns simple voting majorities into parliamentary supermajorities. In a mature democracy with functioning institutions this isn’t so disastrous, but with a predatory party like the ANC in charge at the height of its moral decay, this would be a frightening portent.
They also aim to introduce the tremendously expensive and notoriously unsafe means of electronic voting into out system. The IEC has already attempted to get the dangerous practice of electronic voting introduced, though the Treasury failed to address costs in their budget in time.Civil liberties bodies like the IRR and DearSA have managed to stall the passage of the reform bill by drawing attention to the dramatic and systemic vulnerabilities in electronic voting, an experiment in voting technology which has already been tried and abandoned in advanced countries like the Netherlands. If implemented, such a change would make it impossible for ordinary citizens to know if their vote had been tampered with, and difficult at best for professional and technical observers.
One of the more alarming recommendations was the notion (see S9) that voters may register and vote on the voting roll of a different province or municipality from the one in which they lived, which would in practice allow the ruling party (or any other party with the gall to do so) to register candidates en masse to vote in the districts they most desire to seize. S21 also empowered commissioners thus “[d]espite anything to the contrary contained in this Act or any other law, the Commission may prescribe a different voting method.”
While we can be thankful that this bill was delayed, but Aaron Motsoaledi appears to see opportunity and promise in electronic voting. The typical ANC strategy in this regard is to issue a compromise which establishes precedent, inching by tiny compromise positions ever-nearer to their desired outcome – they are not a regular party by a revolutionary movement with total control as their ultimate aim, as Ramaphosa’s recent comments of the total-state-control policy of cadre deployment reveal. By establishing powers for the IEC to hold e-voting where it pleases in “pilot” districts, the new form of the bill aims to introduce the basic practice of electronic voting, thereby normalising the practice and providing for a means to expand it.
The ruling party is clearly tempted by the opportunity for reforms in their favour, and the expensive and opaque methods for conducting elections that electronic voting offers. So far, their incompetence has prevented these reforms from being implemented, but with the intent of their committees becoming clearer in public statements, and the party and the IEC having already demonstrated intent to delay elections despite a lack of justification, the likelihood is that the reforms will creep ever closer to reality, especially as the 2024 deadline looms, and defeat becomes visible.