Voter registration at the West Coast Village

On Saturday, when we ran our table at the West Coast Village, we got thirty-two names, addresses and phone numbers from people who are not registered. So at this rate we need to run another 190 tables and we'll have the newly-demarcated ward in the bag 8-)

The event we did was experimental; nobody in Table View has ever organised a get-registered event before and we needed to see what turnout we'd get. We can rely on a name added to the list every five minutes on an early-month rugby Saturday at the West Coast Village. We have to get that rate up. I calculate we can only expect another four to six registration tables at any given shopping centre, and if we hope to get 6000 new voters registered by the next election, that means we'd have to get at least a thousand registered each time. This is clearly not going to happen.

What did we do? We were allowed to put two small neat tables and a computer in front of Pick 'n Pay facing the central quad in the West Coast Village. It was a good traffic area, because most people were either visiting Woolworths or Pick 'n Pay in their visit. It didn't take any effort to ask people if they were registered. People who weren't interested said as much, and people who stopped to talk didn't seem at all resentful. The most discouraging thing was the evident disinterest in politics; many people muttered that registering and voting didn't matter. Few people who said this stopped to debate the issue. Those who stopped to talk were frequently politically aware already, and were already registered to vote.

What is apparent also is that the ANC government of the city doesn't form much of a talking point for most people who aren't politically aware. Some reactions to the ANC are, as I always anticipate, viscerally racist and disparaging - but one can at least say that people who think this way are, in a sense, exercising their political will. No, the majority of middle-class people do not allow politics to form part of their experience at all.

So the lesson I take from this is that apathy is something we need to beat first. In order to make our registration campaigns more effective, we must first tackle people's lack of interest.

We agreed around the table that we need a publicity campaign that works simultaneously withe registration campaign. There are a number of messages I hope to develop that will speak to the minds of Table View voters.

I wrote a letter to a business tenant of the West Coast Village who showed loyalty to the Democratic Alliance and helped us a lot in organising the event last weekend. I said

'One important aim of our party is to get vigorous and independently-minded local public representatives elected, who can speak their minds on behalf of the community amongst whom they live. The residents of greater Table View need answers to real local problems, which include pollution, traffic congestion and crime. We know that crime in particular hampers the development of local business.

'We in the DA definitely believe that the future representatives of Table View, Parklands, Sunningdale and Blouberg must be drawn from the people who live in these communities. Who, after all, knows better how to tackle the issues of the area than someone who lives in the community? And we will always oppose the ANC's "deployments" of outsiders whose only loyalties are party loyalties.' -- My letter to tenant of West Coast Village

This letter expresses some of the more conventional messages the DA has used to mobilise support in its core constituency. I'm worried that this range of messages is insufficient to drive a popular mandate for the DA. This isn't the same thing as saying that I doubt that we would get a popular mandate in Table View - I'm certain that the DA is the party of choice for more than 60% of the suburbs of greater Table View. But there is a wide gap between people's tendencies and their votes. We need to make sure that everyone who might express a tendency towards supporting the DA will get out, register and vote.