More than a million voters have registered to vote on the first day of voter registration weekend, the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) announced. On Sunday, more than 600,000 people had already registered by midday surpassing IEC’s targetted of registering 1.7 million voters this past weekend ahead of the 2024 general elections.

ONE MILLION VOTERS REGISTERED 

Briefing the media on Saturday, IEC deputy electoral chief electoral officer Masego Sheburi said that at the close of day one of registration weekend, over a million registrations were recorded at their 23,296 voting stations. “At 12h30 today (Sunday), a total of 609 447 registration transactions had been recorded at voting stations,” Sheburi said. Gauteng has the most registered voters with over 120,000, followed by the Eastern Cape with over 118,000 and KwaZulu-Natal with over 108,000 voters registered this past weekend and Limpopo with 82, 408 voter registrations. Western Cape had the lowest number with just over 37 000 voter registration recorded. This means at least 1.7 million have registered to vote this voter registration weekend as targeted by the IEC.

OVER 100K REGISTERED ONLINE

The IEC has also set the record of over 100,000 online registrations. More than 60 000 voters registered online on Saturday with an additional 40 000 voters registering online on Sunday. The commission said it will also help voters resolve some online registrations that gave a pending message.“The ‘pending’ message is received by voters in instances where the ID image that they have uploaded cannot be read or recognised by the system or where an image other than an ID has been uploaded. We urge voters to take extra care and follow system prompts when uploading images of their ID,” the commission said.