One of the greatest threats to the legitimacy of our democracy is the way the population of registered voters is rapidly ageing.
Over time, the median age of those registered with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) is getting higher, or ageing out. And our voters’ roll is largely static. With older voters dying and few 18- and 19-year-olds registering to vote, the roll itself, devoid of new recruits, is ageing.
This means a smaller and smaller proportion of the eligible voting population participates in successive elections and poll results gradually cease to be representative of the will of the people, which erodes trust in, and the legitimacy of, democratic and governance systems.
Voter participation statistics are usually presented as a percentage of the registered voters who turned out on election day. A more sobering statistic, however, is the percentage of the voting-age demographic — people who have reached voting age and are eligible to register and to vote — that actually turns out to vote. In the 2021 local government elections, that proportion was a devastating 28%, with only 12.2-million out of South Africa’s eligible voting population of 43.1-million people casting their votes.
Age continues to be the single biggest predictor of electoral participation in South Africa, with older people registering and voting at significantly higher proportions than younger generations.
We often speak about declining voter participation among young people in haughty and disapproving terms. Concepts like “youth-voter apathy” and “youth disillusionment” often feature in the discourse, coupled with injunctions to young people to “shape their own future” through the vote. Analysts interrogating the trend often point to attitudes about the value of democracy or young people’s disillusionment with the political options on the table.
Rarely do we simply ask eligible young South Africans themselves why they don’t participate. Is it indeed disillusionment with the political process? Or is it simply a lack of adequate information and education about voter and civic participation in our country?
When a political system lacks legitimacy in the eyes of its people, unelected forces rush in to fill the vacuum
In the 2019 national and provincial elections, only 19% of 18- and 19-year-olds registered with the IEC. But of that registered total, fully 80% turned out to vote on election day. Compare this with the registered 20- to 29-year-olds, only 56% of whom turned out to vote. When first-time voters registered, they followed through on election day and cast their vote at rates comparable with the 83% of registered 60- to 69-year-olds. So how can we better support more young people to register in the first place?
The IEC allows anybody with an identity card to register for the elections — even before they reach voting age. This is a critical part of the pathway towards active engagement for young people. For the past 11 years, the commission has run an annual schools democracy programme, aimed at educating and registering people aged 16 and above, well before the elections in which they will first be eligible to vote. Last year, the campaign added only 30,000 schoolchildren to the voters’ roll.
According to StatsSA’s 2022 mid-year population estimates, the 15 to 39 age cohort constitutes roughly 59% of the country’s eligible registration and voter-age population. The 10,624,172 people in this age group who are actually registered with the IEC constitute 41% of the eligible total. We urgently need not only to register additional voters in this cohort — particularly at the younger end — but to put programmes and initiatives in place to support their greater participation at the ballot.
For some, increased voter participation is urgent because it would result in entirely different electoral results, changing the face of the government and the distribution of seats in parliament and the provincial legislatures. In 2019 the then-IEC chair, Glen Mashinini, calculated that had the entire unregistered population of 18- to 30-year-olds in South Africa registered and voted for a single political party, that party would have achieved a significant majority in the national election.
But I am more interested in the resilience and the longevity of our democracy.
When a political system lacks legitimacy in the eyes of its people, unelected forces rush in to fill the vacuum. Functions such as public policing are gradually taken over by private security firms, armed vigilante groups and mafia syndicates.
Tax strikes are also a feature of a governance system that has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the governed. This is exacerbated when there are failures in the delivery of basic services. As people are increasingly driven to opt out of the public system — from health, education and law enforcement to public utilities such as water and electricity — they begin to wonder why they should pay taxes to a dysfunctional government that they also didn’t elect.
An electorate that questions the value of democratic participation is a fertile hunting ground for authoritarian political entrepreneurs. Autocrats thrive on narratives about how “constitutions do not feed the people” (they do) and “democracy does not put food on the table” (it does). This despite countless studies correlating democratic governance with improved outcomes in everything from maternal mortality to economic growth and job creation.
But democratic governance requires large-scale political participation. A lack of participation reduces accountability, entrenches dysfunction and ultimately results in poorer socioeconomic outcomes for all. Voter abstention is an existential crisis that threatens the very survival of our hard-won democratic system of governance. We should treat it as such.
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