With less than two months before the national and provincial elections on 8 May 2019, the political debates and activities are reaching fever pitch. Politicians are walking the streets trying to inspire voters to make crosses next to their party names.  On social media, opinions are shared freely and the more traditional printed and electronic media are all carrying election stories. All parties have published their manifesto’s and the IEC will probably publish the final list of parties participating in the national and in the nine provincial elections on 19 March. All indications are that there will be a plethora of parties to choose from.

An opinion poll, conducted by Ipsos with fieldwork from 1 February to 4 March this year shows some interesting findings. This is the latest in the Ipsos regular “Pulse of the People™” studies, conducted with a randomly selected sample of adult South Africans. The findings regarding party choice are arrived at by handing respondents an electronic ballot paper to use to mark their choice of party (in imitation of a secret ballot). At the data processing stage, the results are filtered by those who are registered to vote. 

The voters’ roll compiled by the IEC contains 26,774,102 names of South Africans who are registered to vote, meaning that more than 10 million South Africans of voting age have chosen not to register and therefore not to vote in this election. This can probably be attributed to the fact that of all South Africans eligible to vote, a quarter (25%) are not interested in politics / elections and almost four in every ten (38%) say that there is no political party that expresses their  views.

Even among those who registered to vote, more than a third (37%) have indicated that they agree with the statement “There is no political party expressing my views”.  However, this does not mean that they will not turn out to vote on election day. But it must be accepted that uncertainty is part of the political scene in the country.

Currently, just more than six in every ten registered voters (61%) will put their mark next to the ANC’s name in a national election. The ruling party is followed by the DA (16%), EFF (9%) and IFP and FF+ (both at 1%). 11% of registered voters answered that they would not vote, would not vote for a current party, refused to answer or didn’t know which party they would vote for.

Full Statement Attached

Issued by Ipsos