New parties scramble to meet support quota in time
Change Starts Now has already given up, but others say they will meet the Electoral Act threshold by Friday
● New political parties hoping to be on the national ballot in all provinces in May are in a race against time to submit the signatures of at least 100,000 supporters from across the country to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) by Friday.
This is one of the requirements of the new electoral laws, and is intended to keep no-hopers off the ballot paper.
The Electoral Amendment Act stipulates that new parties must demonstrate they have the backing of “15% of the number of votes required to obtain a seat for that [province] in the preceding election”.
Using data from 2019, the IEC provides a breakdown of these “quotas” that shows that they range from 10,271 in the Northern Cape to 13,890 in Gauteng. The total of all nine provinces is just over 100,000.
A similar 15% requirement, based on different quotas, applies for getting onto the ballot for provincial legislatures.
Independent candidates require only 1,000 signatures.
Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi, Colleen Makhubele’s South African Rainbow Alliance and Mmusi Maimane’s Build One South Africa (Bosa) have indicated they have complied with the qualifying criteria to run parliamentary candidates in at least one province.
Several other parties are still scrambling to do so.
Rise Mzansi’s national organiser, Makashule Gana, said the party had deployed volunteers across the country as soon as it was established in April last year. These volunteers had been collecting the required details of supporters, including physical addresses and ID numbers, which were now being populated on the IEC’s gazetted forms.
“The time given to meet the deadlines was adequate and we started early because we knew what we were working towards; we did not wait for the elections to be announced,” Gana said.
“We never expected parties in parliament who voted for this new legislation to make it easy for parties outside to remove them. But we were determined that whatever hurdle they put in front of us as Rise Mzansi we were committed to conquer because we need new leaders.”
“Even if they add new requirements, our ground force is ready; we will do everything to be able to contest the election. We are going to meet the requirements, however high the bar is.”
Makhubele said that while her party had qualified to be on the national ballot and on the provincial ballots in Gauteng and Limpopo, it was making a last-minute push “to galvanise other provinces to finalise signatures, then we can be good”.
Change Starts Now, formed by ex-First Rand group chair Roger Jardine in December, shocked many people this week when it announced it was dropping out of the race. It said the deadline to submit the required signatures was impossible to meet.
The party had hoped the Constitutional Court, in a ruling last Monday, would throw out the signature requirement, but it did not.
“It was the signature requirement that was most challenging,” said party member Murphy Morobe.
“The form in which these signatures is to be presented was promulgated only on February 1, giving unrepresented political parties little more than a month to meet these requirements in the required format,” Morobe said.
Bongani Baloyi of Xiluva said his party accepted the need for the signature requirement.
“We are on our way to meet the threshold; it’s a difficult ask but a necessary filter. If you can’t meet the threshold, how are you going to get the electorate to vote for you? We are going to be in the ballot,” he said.
Bosa’s Maimane said he was confident his party would meet the threshold but noted that many South Africans were unaware of the new signature requirement and reacted with suspicion when asked for their signatures.
“We will get over 100,000 signatures being populated with the IEC; it’s up to the IEC to check whether they have enough of a system to do all the respective verifications. We have crossed over the national threshold at this point, it’s a race against time for the provinces,” Maimane said.
“We will be fine. The problem is that the extension [of the Friday deadline] needs to be granted because voters are not educated about the need for signatures. When we talk to someone and say, ‘We need your signature and ID,’ they immediately think they are voting for us upfront.
“People have never had to do it. Therefore the IEC and parliament drafted a law that in practice leaves voters suspicious about the process.”