One month from today, South Africans will vote in local government elections. If turnout resembles the last local government election, put five registered voters in a room and almost three of them won't vote.

In 2021, some 26.2 million South Africans were registered to vote in the local government elections, but only just over 12 million did. Turnout was 45.87%.

It's certainly not because South Africans don't have enough political choice. In August, the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) said there were 674 registered political parties. A record 136 790 candidates have since been certified to contest just over 10 500 council seats in this election.

South Africa doesn't have a shortage of political parties. It has a shortage of voters. For those political parties that are only now starting to think seriously about the voters they need to reach, they're already too late. A serious campaign should have been running for months, if not longer.

The missing voter isn't only a South African problem. Across 74 national elections held around the world in 2024, average voter turnout was 61%, according to International IDEA, an intergovernmental organisation that works to strengthen democracy and democratic institutions around the world.

Politicians, analysts and journalists spend an enormous amount of time asking which party people are going to vote for. They spend much less time asking about the people who are choosing none of them.

Political campaign

I've covered elections for more than 30 years, but I've never really thought about what it takes to run a political campaign. This week I spent five days with 34 political leaders and campaign practitioners from 12 African countries who do exactly that.

They were participating in the third edition of an executive course on how to run and manage political campaigns, run by the Political Campaigns Resource Hub (PCRH) in partnership with the University of Cape Town. The first cohort had six participants and the second had 12.

The course is part of a wider push to professionalise political campaigning in Africa. Many of the people in the room were already campaign managers, strategists and political leaders, some of whom had been running campaigns for years. They had experience, but what they often didn't have was data to back up what experience and instinct were telling them, or formal training that could turn that knowledge into something that could be tested.

A lot of the discussion during the week was about how to make that data more granular. Knowing that turnout is low tells you something, but knowing where it is low, which voters are staying away, whether they voted before, what matters to them and why they stopped participating tells you much more.

Better-trained campaigners should mean better-organised political parties that understand the people they want to represent and are better able to respond to what we actually need. In this local government election, those needs are very immediate: water, electricity, sanitation, roads and refuse collection are among the bread-and-butter municipal issues dominating the campaign. But better-trained campaigns also become better at persuading us. The same data that helps a party understand what we need can also tell it which messages are most likely to move us.

Simple ideas
One of the simplest ideas discussed during the course was also one of the most important: elections are won between elections. A political party needs to understand and mobilise the voters it already has, identify those who are undecided and, crucially in South Africa, understand those who have stopped voting altogether. That last group matters enormously because losing faith in one political party doesn't necessarily mean voting for another.

Research published in 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal African Affairs, using data from the Centre for Social Change and Ask Afrika 2021 Election Survey, looked at voting behaviour across the 2016, 2019, and 2021 South African elections. Among black African respondents, 18% had voted for the African National Congress (ANC) in both 2016 and 2019 but abstained in 2021, while another 9% moved from the ANC to an opposition party.

For some voters, leaving the ANC didn't mean finding another political home. They stayed away. For parties trying to win votes on 4 November, understanding who those people are, where they are and why they stopped voting matters. Persuading them, however, isn't enough if they don't actually vote. Getting people out to vote, GOTV as campaigners call it, needs to be part of a campaign from the beginning rather than something that suddenly becomes important in the final week.

Better campaigns can listen more closely, understand communities better, and communicate more effectively, but they can also become much more sophisticated at influencing us. The more political parties know about who we are, what worries us and what might persuade us, the more important it becomes that we understand not only what they are telling us but why.

South Africans will choose their local governments on 4 November, but the election won't only be decided by the people choosing between the parties on the ballot. It will also be shaped by the millions who decide whether it's worth turning up at all.

Paula Slier is an international journalist, war correspondent, and speaker whose work focuses on geopolitics, modern conflict, and information warfare.