Around 28.6 million South Africans are registered to vote, but this is only about 62% of the country’s total adult population.

This became known after the Electoral Commission (IEC) released its most recent voter registration figures, following a voter registration weekend held at the end of last month, ahead of the local government elections (LGEs), which are due to be held on 4 November.

According to the IEC there are now 28 559 782 people registered to vote in South Africa. However, there are approximately 45.5 million people older than 18 in South Africa, meaning that of all eligible voters only about 62% have registered to vote.

The municipality with the highest number of registered voters was Johannesburg, which had 2.4 million registered voters. The only other municipality with more than two million registered voters was Cape Town, which had 2.1 million people on the voters’ roll.

Three other municipalities had more than one million registered voters: these were eThekwini (1.9 million), Ekurhuleni (1.7 million), and Tshwane (1.6 million).

The municipality with the fewest registered voters was Laingsburg in the Western Cape, which had 5 182 people registered to vote.

In the 2021 LGEs the total number of people who voted was about 12 million, with the total number of registered voters then being about 26.2 million people. This meant that while the total turnout of registered voters was about 46.0%, the proportion of total eligible voters (all South Africans over the age of 18) who cast a ballot was only about 30.0%.

While turnout in the 2021 LGEs was depressed because of the Covid-19 pandemic, turnout in South African elections has been declining for some time. Turnout of registered voters in the 2024 national election was 58.9% and of eligible voters 39.1%, the lowest for a national election in post-apartheid South Africa.

This year’s LGEs are also likely to have a lower turnout, with the possibility of fewer than half of registered voters turning out, and possibly fewer than 30% of all eligible voters.

There are two reasons why this may not be a bad thing.

The first is that while a number of analysts bemoan the low turnout figures, they are partly reflective of communities in which people have come to take responsibility upon themselves and their communities for functions once executed by the state. As confidence in politicians broadly falls, people tend to move away from politics as a means of solving their problems and instead adopt community-centred solutions.

A second reason is that if people were forced to vote, as is the case in Australia, for example, there is no telling who they would vote for, or why, and radical populist parties might easily gain ground, especially given South Africa's very high rates of inequality and unemployment.