Please find attached soundbites in English and Afrikaans by Adrian Roos MP
The DA will be monitoring Home Affairs offices over the voting weekend after reports of unusual levels of downtime at several Home Affairs offices over the past week, most notably in Somerset West and Stellenbosch.
The Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, has announced that Home Affairs offices will be open during the same hours as voting is open for identity document applications. The DA calls on the Minister to ensure that there is not a repeat of registration weekend where Home Affairs offices were offline for almost an entire day due to a challenge with the temporary identity certificate payment system.
This downtime prevented citizens from applying for temporary identity certificates and similar downtime on election weekend could result in South Africans being unable to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. It cannot be as on registration weekend when it took virtually a whole day to resolve an issue.
The DA calls on the Minister to ensure that service providers are on standby to resolve downtime issues timeously and should the payment system be down that the temporary identity certificate fee be waived.
The DA will furthermore be monitoring issues where Home Affairs offices are closed when they should be open and incidents where South Africans are unfairly turned away from Home Affairs offices. On registration weekend people attempting to apply for a temporary ID reported being turned away from Benoni Home Affairs with claims that the office was only processing identity documents for ‘the youth’.
Citizens are encouraged to report any issues experienced to DA volunteers at their nearest voting station.
We will be monitoring Home Affairs to ensure free and fair elections and call on South Africans to vote for the party that gets things done, the DA.
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