Vote Home campaign reports back on voting abroad

People’s Assembly caught up with Francine Higham of the Vote Home campaign to get a sense of how yesterday’s voting abroad went. Numbers are what count the most but final figures have yet to be tallied. Unofficially the figure was 8 500 in London alone, with an estimate of over 1 000 votes being cast in Doha. In 2009 voter turn out was 9 857 globally.

While the core Vote Home team is based in London they have volunteers around the world. The communication strategy is primarily the utilisation of social media. In London they tried to put up posters but encountered resistance from South African shops to have anything politically-based up on their windows – including neutral posters encouraging people to register to vote.

Higham spent the day on Trafalgar Square, keeping in touch with her fellow volunteers around the world via WhatsApp. She said it was unexpectedly hot weather for England with a two to three hours wait in the queue.

“There were a lot of people. If you think about it, the biggest polling station in South Africa caters for about four thousand people, London is double that. One of the hickups on the day was that mothers struggled to get their buggies into the High Commission so after a two hour wait with screaming kids they left without voting”.

Higham also says that South Africa House ran out of pens a couple of times throughout the day, but the volunteers stepped into the fray and handed more out to people in the queue.

The voting process was also more complicated that getting your ID book checked and casting your vote. Higham explained that people “needed to fill in number of forms before they could vote. I think the IEC should review the process to speed it up. The Department of International Relations and cooperation (DIRCO) and the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) could look at electronic means to managing the process. Our ID books are bar-coded so they could use scanners”.

Higham also made mention of “angry and frustrated people” who registered to vote in February but weren’t informed about filling in a VEC10 forms. “The IEC did communicate the information but the embassy staff didn’t. I’m interested to see how many VEC5 forms, the official compliant forms sent to the IEC, are logged by voters who were turned away yesterday,” explained Higham.

She added the travel issue was also a big challenge. “There are 35 000 South Africans living in Perth but it’s cheaper for them to fly to South Africa than Canberra. Someone in Vancouver flew to LA because its closer than Ontario”, Higham said.

She told People’s Assembly that Vote Home campaigned for more voting stations but the South African government explained that ballots had to be cast on South African soil. According to the Geneva Convention this is limited to embassies and high commissions, and rules out honorary consulates.

“We need to consider electronic voting or at least postal and proxy votes, which other countries do”, said Higham.

Challenges aside, Higham said the overall experience across the globe was a positive one. On Trafalgar Square there was a particularly good ambiance. “The people in the queue did Mexican waves and were singing the anthem and Shosholoza. At one stage South African shops came to sell boerewors rolls and cream sodas, but as they didn’t have a traders license they were soon shut done by the police”, she said.