Are political parties allowed to phone you?

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JEREMY MAGGS: Some voters have been receiving calls from the Democratic Alliance (DA) asking them to confirm registration details. The party saying it wants to make sure that voters are registered correctly. They say they’re doing this because the IEC (Independent Electoral Commission) has new rules about voters only being eligible to vote at one place. So what are the rules around this and are these calls actually legal. Election operations manager, James Aphane, is with us. So what’s the answer?

JAMES APHANE: Well, it is as long as people allow it. So if you feel uncomfortable that you shouldn’t be contacted, you need to tell whoever is contacting you that, no, please don’t contact me. It’s similar to direct marketing, there is legislation, I can’t remember the actual provisions of that legislation.

So, a person obviously can be approached, but if you feel uncomfortable, then you can say, please don’t contact me.

JEREMY MAGGS: What kind of information is allowed to be solicited and what line are parties not allowed to cross?

JAMES APHANE: Obviously, parties are not allowed to, if they have access to personal information, to use it for things other than political activities. So you may find that the party, such as the DA, would have received a voters’ roll from the IEC and we provided a voters’ roll without ID numbers because that’s personal information. But they’ll have a list of people who are registered in that area.

But it is also possible that the DA uses, or any party, by the way, other sources of information where they could, for instance, (use) the direct marketing database, and make a connection between the people they see on the voters’ roll and the people they have in direct marketing because we do not provide the cell phone numbers (on the voters’ roll) they acquire from the IEC. So they’re allowed to approach people, as I said, so they’re not allowed to proceed with this interaction if a particular citizen is not comfortable with it.

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JEREMY MAGGS: So just to simplify that then, you are well within your rights to refuse to give them any information.

JAMES APHANE: Absolutely.

JEREMY MAGGS: Let’s take a look at some of the other issues facing the IEC at the moment. We are now into election year. Voter registration takes place later this week. So far, is the commission happy with the way in which voter registration has gone in the past? Are you sufficiently satisfied that enough eligible people have registered?

JAMES APHANE: Yes, we are. Actually, if you look at the registration weekend we had last year, November 18 and 19, we had such a lot of people who actually participated in that voter registration weekend. The section of the society that people are always worried about is the youth, and the youth actually came out in big numbers…

I don’t have the stats in front of me, but we had over 500 000 new registrations, the majority of which were young people.

We start talking young people from the age of 18 or so. But in the previous election, there were also people who had never registered before, which I considered to be young, just below the age of 40, I think it was 35 or so. If you start calculating from there, there was just a high number of people who are young. If you look at ages 30 or 35, some of which have never registered before. So there’s quite a high interest.

As we move to the second voter registration weekend, we are anticipating a higher turnout, more than the previous registration weekend. You might be aware that we have also got an online facility and for the first time in this election, we opened online voter registration overseas. So since December last year, we’ve received quite a high number of registrations on that platform. So from December 6 up until January 15 this year, there were just over 7000 registrations on that platform.

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JEREMY MAGGS: There will be a number of people casting their votes whenever that election is called. It does, of course, beg the question, doesn’t it, as to whether the IEC has the capacity to manage such a large poll this time around?

JAMES APHANE: Well, the IEC has done so on several occasions. So we are now at a conference year, where we’re talking to unrepresented political parties. One of the things that my manager just mentioned here is the fact that the IEC always plans for over 100%, 110%. So we go overboard to make sure that everybody is served. The reason I’m talking about this over 100% planning and provisioning is because we’re talking about, for instance, the ballot papers. So if people can vote where they’re registered, the chances are there will not be any issues such as the common ones that get reported so quickly, such as the ballots running short. It’s because our people, registered people, sometimes go to voting stations where they’re not registered.

But we’re talking to the unrepresented political parties to make sure that they understand the processes, including the fact that there’s a provision now in this election wherein you cannot just rock up at any voting station to try to cast your vote, even if it’s for a national ballot, because remember, that’s where you may have issues with insufficient ballots because people can just vote anyway. In this election, you need to notify us that you’re going to be voting at a voting station other than the one you’re registered at.

JEREMY MAGGS: And just a final question, is the IEC confident that it has taken sufficient precautions against cyber threats?

JAMES APHANE: Absolutely. We have done so, and we continue to monitor, and we are well aware, we engage with various companies and experts in terms of the security issues in the cyber space. We have what we call DDoS mitigation, we’ve got the firewalls and we’ve got continuous monitoring, and we can see that people are making attempts and we are able to block them regularly. So we’re very awake and alert.

But besides (that), we’ve introduced a lot of security layers, including encryption. So each and every transaction we do either on our voter management devices (VMDs) or the one that you do online yourself as a voter, each and every transaction is encrypted as it travels across the web, the moment it arrives in our database, the database is also encrypted. Even if you were to get access to our database by chance, you will not be able to use it because it’s actually encrypted.

JEREMY MAGGS: James Aphane, thank you very much indeed.