By Nyasha McBride Mpani (Guest Writer)
An announcement by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) expressing readiness to roll out the next municipal ballot between November 2 this year and January 31 next year was met with projections by analysts on what period would be optimal to increase voter turnout.
The argument advanced by analysts in Business Day that a November political campaign period would boost voter turnout is intuitively appealing. Avoid the December shutdown, escape January fatigue, and voters will show up.
It suggests there can be a neat administrative fix to a deeply political problem. Yet those who have worked on political campaigns can appreciate that South Africa’s turnout crisis is less of a scheduling problem and more of a political campaign failure.
When participation collapses it is a political campaign failure that no calendar or schedule can remedy because it is fundamentally a failure to engage, persuade, attract or mobilise the ‘missing voter’. Scheduling is unlikely to sway the ‘missing voter’, meaning the segment of a population that is registered to vote but opts out and those eligible to register and vote but do not register at all.
Admittedly, there is credible evidence that political campaign timing can marginally influence turnout. Political campaigns conducted outside holiday periods, in milder weather, and away from examination cycles tend to perform slightly better.
November avoids year-end travel, back-to-school costs, and post-December economic strain. From a logistical perspective, it is a defensible choice until one factors in the motivations of the ‘missing voter’.
Is the ‘missing voter’ really motivated by timing and can they be influenced by scheduling? The existing data suggests otherwise.
South Africa’s participation decline predates the current debate about political campaign timing. Turnout has been falling for more than two decades, including political campaigns conducted in so-called optimal months.
The clearest evidence is the 2021 local government political campaign cycle. Conducted in November, it produced the lowest turnout since 1994. If November were the answer, that political campaign should have been the proof point. It was not.
Many of the missing voters are disproportionately young, urban, and economically marginal. They are registered, informed, and digitally connected. They know when political campaigns happen. They simply do not believe that participation produces accountability, consequence, or change. Their decision to stay home is political and not necessarily informed by whether the timing of an election is convenient.
Afrobarometer data also points to a much deeper issue than turnout or institutional trust. In the latest 2024/2025 survey, nearly four in ten South Africans indicated that the country should consider alternative methods to elections for choosing its leaders.
Just 60% still affirm elections as the preferred mechanism of political selection. This is not apathy; it is democratic scepticism. When a significant share of the electorate begins to question elections themselves, adjusting election dates cannot restore participation.
What is eroding is not convenience, but belief. And what is emerging is the ‘missing voter’, a disengaged silent majority.
According to Afrobarometer data released in 2025, trust in the Electoral Commission of South Africa has declined sharply, from a high of 69% in 2011 to just 31% in 2025.
That collapse matters. Turnout follows trust. When voters lose confidence in the transformative potential of electoral outcomes, they disengage from the contest, regardless of how well the political campaign calendar is designed.
Comparative experience shows that changing election dates can produce modest turnout gains under specific conditions.
In high-trust democracies with competitive races and strong party mobilisation such as Germany and parts of the Nordic region, moving elections away from holiday periods has sometimes increased participation at the margins. But there is no credible case in which calendar reform alone reversed a sustained turnout decline.
Where trust is weak and political campaigns fail to persuade, date changes produce little more than statistical noise.
Globally, local government elections almost always attract lower voter turnout than national contests. This is a well-documented comparative trend. However, it would be disingenuous to treat a change in election dates as a panacea for South Africa’s ‘missing voter’ problem.
In systems where trust in institutions, party credibility, and political campaign mobilisation are weak, turnout declines regardless of when elections are held.
The consequences are visible in South Africa’s growing ‘missing voter’ problem. The country no longer struggles primarily with registration. It struggles with political campaign mobilisation.
South Africa’s population now stands at roughly 60,4 million people, of whom about 41 million are eligible to vote. Yet in the 2024 national political campaign, turnout reached only 58.6% of registered voters. In absolute terms, this meant that more than 11.5 million registered South Africans did not participate in the election.
This silent bloc is larger than the support base of any single political party. The African National Congress, while remaining the largest party, secured roughly 40% of votes cast, but only about 23% of support from the eligible voting population.
Power is increasingly being exercised on the basis of shrinking participation rather than broad democratic consent.
From a political campaign perspective, this is not accidental abstention. It is strategic disengagement.
Several structural factors reinforce this ‘missing voter’ phenomenon. Voter education is treated as procedural compliance rather than political campaign persuasion. Mobilisation remains episodic instead of continuous. Most damaging is the lived reality that political campaigns change officeholders but not outcomes: municipalities remain dysfunctional, corruption recurs, and consequences feel abstract. Under these conditions, shifting election dates treats symptoms, not causes.
None of this suggests that timing is irrelevant. A poorly chosen political campaign window can suppress turnout further, especially among voters facing transport costs, insecure work, and caregiving responsibilities. Analysts are right to consider these constraints carefully.
However, presenting November as a turnout solution risks overstating the power of the calendar and understates the depth of political disaffection.
You do not fix voter turnout with dates. You fix it with political campaigns that persuade, mobilise, and rebuild trust. Until political actors confront that reality, South Africa’s turnout will remain fragile, and its democratic mandate increasingly thin.
The ‘missing voter’ is made up of the millions who have opted out and who will not be won back by a different election date but by political campaigns that once again convince citizens that participation still matters.
Until political campaigns persuade citizens that power can be exercised through the ballot, no date on the calendar will bring South Africa’s ‘missing voter’ back.
About Writer
Nyasha McBride Mpani is a visiting Political Campaigns Specialist at the Political Campaigns Resource Hub a subsidiary of the International Centre for Political Campaigns
