Profiel van stemrechten

South Africa

Africa · za

Parliamentary republic with closed-list proportional representation. The 400-member National Assembly is filled from two ballots - 200 regional seats distributed across the nine provinces and 200 national compensatory seats - and the Assembly then elects the President. Since the Electoral Amendment Act took effect for the 2024 election, independent candidates may contest the regional and provincial ballots alongside parties.

Profiel laatst herzien August 29, 2026

South Africa has had universal adult suffrage only since 1994. Before that the franchise was narrowed by race in stages: African voters in the Cape were struck from the common roll in 1936, Coloured voters between 1951 and 1956, and the tricameral constitution of the 1980s gave Coloured and Indian citizens separate chambers while excluding the Black majority from national representation altogether. Voting today is on paper, counted at the voting station and posted outside it before the results slip is captured, audited and scanned at a municipal site, and elections are run by the Electoral Commission, a constitutionally independent Chapter 9 institution rather than a government department. Registration is voter-initiated, so the national common voters' roll - 27,782,677 people when it closed for the 2024 election - is well short of the voting-age population. The 2024 general election ended thirty years of single-party majorities and produced the country's first national coalition government since the transition.

Hoe stemmen vandaag werkt

Stemgerechtigde leeftijd: 18 en ouder
Kiezersregistratie: Door de kiezer geïnitieerd
Identificatie: Identiteitsbewijs met foto vereist
Stemplicht: Nee
Stemmen per post: Niet beschikbaar
Vroeg stemmen: Beperkt
Online stemmen: Niet beschikbaar
Stemmen vanuit het buitenland: Beperkt

Section 19(3)(a) of the Constitution gives every adult citizen the right to vote in secret in elections for any legislative body established under it. Citizens may apply to register from 16 but vote from 18. Registration is voter-initiated, done online at any time or in person at one of the commission's 269 offices, and the roll closes on the day the President proclaims the election. Voters must present a bar-coded identity document, smart identity card or temporary identity certificate. There is no postal voting: a voter who cannot attend on the day may apply for a special vote cast in the two days before the poll, including home visits for people who are elderly, infirm, disabled or pregnant. Citizens abroad may register and vote at diplomatic missions but receive only the national ballot. Prisoners may register and vote whatever their sentence, and are enrolled at the address where they lived before incarceration.

Hoe het kiesrecht veranderde

Elke vermelding registreert een verandering in wie kon stemmen, of hoe — uitbreidingen, beperkingen en procedurele hervormingen alike.

1930Uitbreiding
The Women's Enfranchisement Act gave white women the right to vote and to be elected to Parliament; women of every other racial classification remained excluded.
Segregationist legislation timeline 1930-1939
1936Beperking
The Representation of Natives Act removed African voters in the Cape from the common roll, replacing their vote with indirect representation by white senators and an advisory Natives Representative Council.
Segregationist legislation timeline 1930-1939
1951Beperking
The Separate Representation of Voters Act removed Coloured voters in the Cape from the common roll and placed them on a separate roll electing white representatives; after the courts struck it down, Parliament revalidated it through the South Africa Act Amendment Act of 1956.
Apartheid legislation 1850s-1970s
1968Beperking
The Separate Representation of Voters Amendment Act ended Coloured parliamentary representation and substituted a Coloured Persons Representative Council whose bills required ministerial approval; the South African Indian Council Act created a body for Indian South Africans with no legislative power at all.
Apartheid legislation 1850s-1970s
1983Hervorming
A whites-only referendum on 2 November 1983 approved a new constitution creating a tricameral Parliament, which took effect in 1984. Coloured and Indian South Africans regained a parliamentary vote, but only in separate chambers of their own alongside the white House of Assembly; Black South Africans remained excluded from national representation altogether.
The Tricameral Parliament
1994Uitbreiding
The first non-racial election was held under universal adult suffrage: 19,533,498 votes were cast, 19 parties contested, and the African National Congress won 62.65% and 252 of the 400 National Assembly seats.
Elections in post-apartheid South Africa
2020Hervorming
In New Nation Movement NPC and Others v President of the Republic of South Africa the Constitutional Court declared the Electoral Act unconstitutional to the extent that adults could be elected to the National Assembly and provincial legislatures only through membership of a political party, obliging Parliament to open those elections to independent candidates.
Electoral Commission 2024 National and Provincial Elections Report
2024Hervorming
The Electoral Amendment Act was applied for the first time: voters received three ballots instead of two, 11 independent candidates stood for the National Assembly and provincial legislatures, and none was elected.
How the Quota and Distribution of Seats is Calculated for the 2024 National and Provincial Elections

Waarborgen bij de telling

Stembiljettype: Papieren stembiljetten
Nacontrole na de verkiezingen: Ad hoc
Verkiezingsadministratie: Onafhankelijke commissie
Binnenlandse waarnemers: Ja
Internationale waarnemers: Ja

Ballots are counted at the voting station and the station's result is posted outside it before the results slip travels to a municipal capture site, where it is captured, audited and scanned so that party and independent-candidate agents can compare the scanned image against the captured figure. Any interested party may lodge an objection material to the result under section 55 of the Electoral Act, and the commission may order recounts: in 2024 it upheld 17 of 110 objections and ordered 35 recounts. Decisions of the commission are appealable to the Electoral Court. There is no routine statistical or risk-limiting audit of the national tally. For the 2024 election the commission considered 398 applications to observe and accredited 191 organisations, 23 of them international institutions; 80 of the accredited organisations later filed observation reports with it.

Goed om te weten

The National Assembly's 400 seats were filled from two separate ballots for the first time in 2024: 200 regional seats open to parties and independent candidates, and 200 compensatory seats open only to parties. All 11 independent candidates failed to win a seat, the best-placed polling about 12,000 votes.African Union Election Observation Mission to the 29 May 2024 General Elections in the Republic of South Africa: Final Report
Prisoners may register and vote whatever their sentence or offence, and are registered at their pre-incarceration home address; 25,883 offenders applied to register at 235 correctional facilities before the 2024 election.Electoral Commission 2024 National and Provincial Elections Report
Real411, a public complaints platform for online electoral harms run jointly by the Electoral Commission and Media Monitoring Africa since 2019, received 289 election-related reports in 2024 against 99 in 2019; more than half were upheld as misinformation or disinformation, and X carried the largest share.Tracking Trends from Real411: Impact of Mis- and Disinformation in the 2024 National and Provincial Elections in South Africa
Turnout as a share of the registered roll was 89% in 1999, 76% in 2004 and 77% in 2009, and has fallen at every national election since: 73% in 2014, 66% in 2019 and 58% in 2024, the lowest the Electoral Commission has recorded.Electoral Commission 2024 National and Provincial Elections Report