The Constitution gives everyone who is a citizen and 18 years or older the right to vote in elections.

The electoral system for the national assembly and provincial legislatures is the proportional representation system and all citizens are entitled to vote if they are registered voters. Voters vote for a party or an independent candidate of their choice.

The local government electoral system is a mixture of proportional representation and constituency system.

South Africa holds national, provincial and local elections every five years and the local government elections usually occur about two years after the national and provincial elections.

Having regular, free and fair elections is one of the cornerstones of democracy. This goes together with other important democratic principles such as the right to vote, to choose which party you want to belong to and the obligation to accept the results of an election.

There are different ways to elect representatives into government, including the system of proportional representation and the constituency-based system. The South African national and provincial elections are based on the system of proportional representation while the local government electoral system is partly based on proportional representation and partly constituency-based. In 2024 the Constitutional Court order that independents must be able to stand for national and provincial elections was implemented.

CHANGES TO THE ELECTORAL ACT IN 2024

In 2024 amendments to the Electoral Act were passed by Parliament to accommodate independent candidates in Provincial Legislatures and Parliament. Three ballots were used and parties received seats according to the percentage of the votes they won. Independents could also compete for a provincial seat or a regional to national seat. 

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION

This means that parties get a certain number of seats in parliament according to the percentage of votes that they get in an election. So, for example, if your party gets 15% of all the votes in the country then it gets 15% of the seats in parliament.

There are 400 seats in the national parliament. So for every 1% of the vote, a party gets 4 seats. The example on the next page shows how seats are allocated for the top three parties that won seats in the 2014 election.

EXAMPLE: NATIONAL ELECTIONS 2014

CONSTITUENCY-BASED ELECTIONS

According to this system, the country is divided into voting areas called constituencies. Each political party chooses one person to represent the party in each constituency. This person is the party’s candidate. Independents can also stand without a party backing them. People in a constituency vote for the candidate of their choice. So, a person only goes to parliament if they get the most votes in that constituency. It is also called   the “first past the post” system and is used for ward councillor elections in South Africa 

For national and provincial elections there are no small constituencies. Each province is in effect a multi-member constituency.