Technology companies attending the electronic voting conference in Cape Town have emphasized the need for digital transformation to enable an electronic electoral voting process in South Africa.
The three-day conference, which ended on Wednesday, brought together political leaders, decision-makers, business representatives, civil society, and the public to discuss the feasibility of implementing e-voting in the country.
Technical solution consultant Williem Van Schalwyk highlighted the focus on enhancing voter verification and registration processes.
“A lot of focus on voter verification, voter registration, so enabling the manual process to a digital process. We have recently formed a partnership with an international company that develops electronic voting machines, and we have been partnering with them now to provide that solution to the market that we are targeting, specifically the African market. We will also be looking at the South African market to explore the possibility of implementing our solution,” said Van Schalwyk.
The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has opened a six-month period for further inputs and consultations on e-voting discussion documents, which will later be submitted to Parliament.
IEC Deputy CEO Masego Sheburi encourages public participation.
“As a way forward, there will be a window of opportunity. Now that the discussion document has been launched to have a focused period of six months to deal with key stakeholders to have focused discussions in order to improve the discussion document we record the feedback that we receive and for those who want once we’ve done that, the document will be subjected to a discussion internally in the commission and a proper document which narrows a solution, which spells out country imperatives, for considering e-voting will be presented and ultimately if they determine that we’ll be able to proceed, it will be tabled to parliament,” said Sheburi.
The conference also featured presentations from various countries sharing their e-voting experiences and exhibitors displaying electronic voting gadgets.
The public is encouraged to submit contributions via the IEC’s website before the September deadline.
Countries using e-voting will share their experiences today
