If South Africans had the choice to vote for a “None of the Above” (NOTA) option in elections, it would probably be the most popular choice.

Fewer and fewer South Africans are turning out at elections. If the NOTA option (the people who decided not to vote) were a separate political party, it would be by far the single biggest political party in the country and it would have won every election since 2014.

This is according to an analysis conducted by The Common Sense.

To determine the number of people voting for the hypothetical NOTA Party, the analysis looked at the total number of eligible voters and subtracted the number of people who turned out to vote. People who did not turn out to vote were counted as voting for the NOTA Party.

The same exercise was conducted for the number of registered voters.

(Eligible voters are all South Africans over the age of 18 while registered voters are those who are eligible to vote and have registered to put themselves on the voters’ roll.)

In 1994 the total number of people eligible to vote was 22.7 million (in that election there was no voters’ roll and the number of registered voters was the same as the number of eligible voters).

The African National Congress (ANC) won 12.2 million votes, or 53.9% as a proportion of all eligible voters.

The number of people who did not vote was 3.2 million. If we assign all these people to the NOTA Party, it accounted for 14.0% of all eligible voters in the 1994 election.

The graphic below shows the same figures for every election from 1994 to 2024:

The NOTA Party share of the vote has increased steadily from the original 14.0% in 1994 to 60.9%, as a proportion of eligible voters, in 2024, and 41.1% as a proportion of registered voters, in 2024.

The 2009 election was the last election where the number of people who voted for the ANC was more than the number of eligible voters who did not vote. In 2024, the number of people who voted for the ANC was for the first time less than the number of eligible and registered voters who did not vote.

Deputy editor Marius Roodt told The Common Sense that “these numbers should not be mistaken for voter apathy, and that not voting is also an active political decision. Instead, the numbers reveal something else, which is that as South Africans have grown disillusioned with politics, more and more communities are appropriating for themselves what they once trusted politicians and the state to do.”