The right to vote should be automatic
Aright you can be denied unless you stand in queues and fill in forms is not a right at all. Last weekend, South Africans were exhorted to register to vote, a ritual that is seen by just about everyone as entirely normal.
As usual, no one suggested that voter registration is deeply undemocratic. No one demanded it be scrapped. It is difficult to understand why.
The right to vote is the most basic political right human beings enjoy. Without it, we cannot force the government to serve us — we are doomed to serve it.
People who cannot vote are not citizens, they are subjects of those who govern them. And yet, in this country this right is not automatic. We can exercise it only if we do what officials tell us to do to claim it.
Would we really believe we were free to speak if freedom of speech could be exercised only if we registered to have our say? Yet we believe that we are all free to vote even though some are denied this right if they fail to register.
Voter registration’s chief function is to exclude people who have a right to vote.
In the US, this is deliberate. Registration is designed in many states to exclude people the governing elite believe are likely to vote for their opponents: it is usually used against racial minorities.
Here, if there is any reason for insisting on registration (beyond the view that anything that happens in the US must happen here), it is to save officials trouble.
But the effect is again to deny the vote to some who want it. Surveys found that in the first years of democracy more than a few citizens wanted to vote but were not registered.
If you challenge registration, you are obviously asked what the alternative is.
The answer is simple, and it has been used in many countries, including this one during the period when only whites could vote.
Citizens would automatically be placed on the voters roll when they turned 18. The government would then contact the citizen to confirm this.
Since the government maintains a population register, there should be no problem in identifying when people reach voting age and then transferring them on to the roll.
This would mean more work for officials because people must be registered in the area in which they live so that they can vote there in local elections.
In theory, the government should know where everyone lives, but many people’s accurate addresses are not on the system. This is, of course, the problem that has been worrying the Electoral Commission of SA since the courts ruled that it must record voters addresses.
Officialdom would no doubt argue that this shows it is impossible to implement automatic voting rights.
But making sure all addresses on the voters roll are accurate is not beyond the government’s capacity, so there is no reason why the burden should be shifted from officials to the people.
Also, the courts told the electoral commission that it, not voters, was responsible for fixing the problem.
So why should it not also be its responsibility, with the rest of the government, to ensure that everyone is on the voters roll?
Given this, the Constitutional Court should be asked to decide whether forcing people to register denies their right to vote. If it says it doesn’t, so that registration stays, citizens who care about democratic rights could – and should – campaign for a change in the law.
If we want to strengthen democracy in SA, we need to question why it is up to officials to decide how and whether all of us can claim our most basic right.