Young people ten times more likely to vote – IEC

South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has said that its research has shown that low voter turnout among young people is not a result of apathy.

This is according to the IEC’s Deputy Chief Electoral Officer Masego Sheburi, who answered questions following a press briefing about the organisation’s preparation for the 2026 Local Government Elections (LGE).

Political apathy is when people lose interest in politics, often caused by feeling that the system does not work for them or voter fatigue.

“We do not ascribe to the understanding that there is apathy among young people. From our research, once registered, younger persons are more likely to vote than any other age cohort,” Sheburi said.

“In fact, they are ten times more likely to vote than any other age group. In the 2021 LGE, over 70% of young people who registered for the first time tuned out to cast their vote in the elections.”

In the 2024 elections, just over 11 million people aged 18 to 29 formed part of South Africa’s eligible voting age population (VAP). However, fewer than five million registered to vote.

On the other hand, the percentage of VAP registered of the other cohorts steadily increased with age. For instance, 67% of those aged 30 to 39 registered, 79% aged 40 to 49, and 90% aged 50 to 59.

Sheburi argued that young people’s lack of engagement is due to fewer opportunities than older generations to register and vote.

Therefore, he added that the IEC will continue to work to encourage young people to participate by removing any barriers to registration.

“We persist with our online voter registration. We will continue with school-based voter registration and civic education drives, as well as drives in all tertiary institutions, be they TVET colleges or university campuses.”

In a paper titled Making sense of voter turnout in the 2024 South African National and Provincial Elections published in the Journal of African Elections in 2024, University of Pretoria’s Dr. Sithembile Mbete points to the success of these initiatives.

She notes that the IEC used social media campaigns and partnered with civil society organisations to encourage first-time voters under 30, which somewhat paid off.

The IEC reported that 77% of new registrations came from people between 19 and 29, the largest VAP cohort, which consisted of over 11 million people in 2024.

Mbete echoed the IEC’s generational theory of voter participation, which suggests that people become increasingly interested in elections as they age, as a probable cause for a lack of youth participation.

However, she argues that South Africa’s high levels of youth unemployment mean many will be unable to “achieve the traditional markers of adulthood associated with electoral participation.”

Voting numbers plummeting

While the IEC may be seeing some success in encouraging younger people to vote, it has a much bigger problem: the decline of the overall voter turnout at elections.

The IEC defines voter turnout as the percentage of registered voters who cast their vote. Looking at the National elections over time, this metric went from 89.3% in 1999 to 58.6% 25 years later.

However, this is an uncommon measure of voter turnout. The international standard uses the total number of eligible voters as the denominator, known as the voting age population (VAP) turnout.

In contrast to the IEC’s definition, it considers voter apathy when assessing participation in a nation’s democracy.

Using the VAP turnout definition, data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) shows that voter turnout was at its highest in 1994 at 85.5%.

This figure steadily decreased over the next four elections, dropping below 50% in 2019.

The 2024 election saw a record-low VAP turnout of 39.6%.

Despite the population increasing by roughly 76% from 22.6 million to 39.8 million between 1999 and 2024, the increase in votes cast from 1999 to 2024 was only 63,054 — 0.3% of the population increase.