Monday, February 20, 2006
Elections less than ten days away
As you might, or might not know, the elections on March first are run quite differently to the national elections – and it is not very easy to understand the mechanics of the local election. For example, why is the municipality chosen through a proportional representation system but ward representatives are elected on a first past the post basis?
To explain all this, and other aspects of how the local elections work – the sabcnews.com web site has put up a special presentation explaining the ins and outs of the local elections. Even if you are confident that you know how the system works, it is really worthwhile looking at this presentation – you will need a Flash 8 player. And you can download the player using a link on the SABCnews.com web site.
Now let’s look at some of the web sites.
All the parties that I checked – and I admit that I did not go through all 97 parties – have a serious internet presence. They all appear to focus quite heavily on their respective leader – which is a little strange because their leaders are not up for election. But I suppose they have to start someplace, and the party leader is a good focal point.
The second common element in the party web sites is a party manifesto. This is good because they make it easy to find out what the party is all about.
Last week, the DA announced with some virtual fanfare that it had just released the first party political podcast in this country. Now whether this is true or not depends on your definition of what is a podcast. The Da’s podcast is really an MP3 recording of excerpts Tony Leon’s speech at a school – fair enough – that could count as a podcast.
But then the ACDP also has MP3 recordings available for download from its site. In this case the party describes them as radio adverts in English and in Sesotho. So did the ACDP really have the first political podcast?
The ANC has no audio on its fairly extensive election sub-site but it does have comprehensive candidates’ lists – still no mayoral candidates – but you can see quite easily who is on the PR lists and who are the ward candidates for each municipality. Most party web sites do not carry lists of their candidates.
The DA party lists are a little scrappy – for some provinces they are quite complete; and in others there are only PR candidates while some have none at all.
The IFP – which has a really old picture of its leader – actually has a button on its navigation bar for candidates – but the button doesn’t work.
It really is not a good idea to raise expectations if you don’t have the material to display. And talking about displaying material, while preparing this programme yesterday – the independent electoral commission web site at www.elections.org.za appeared to be off-line – hope they’ll be rocking and rolling pretty soon.
That wraps up this special election edition of Cybersurf. Next week we’ll be coming to you directly from the IEC centre in
- SABC News.com - Elections Feature
