Home Affairs open for registration weekend

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Pretoria- The Department of Home Affairs will open its offices between 8am and 5pm on Saturday and Sunday.

This will allow voters who have not yet collected their identity documents (ID) to collect them and those who may have lost their IDs to apply for a temporary document certificate in order to register in this weekend's voter registration.

The department this week announced that there were over 200 000 smart ID cards and over 70 000 green bar coded IDs that are ready for collection at its branches around the country.

Enquiries regarding ID documents can be made to the Home Affairs Call Centre on 0800 60 11 90.

Those who have applied for an ID can check the status of their application by sending their ID number to 32551.

The Electoral Commission of South Africa requires all those visiting a voting station to have with them a valid South African identity document. This could be either a green bar-coded ID book, a smartcard ID or a valid Temporary Identity Certificate.

Applicants will also need to provide an address of where they live that is located in the voting district where they are registering.

Where voters do not have a formal address they will need to provide sufficient details of where they live to allow election officials to confirm they are registering in the correct voting district.

However, proof of address is not a prerequisite for registration.

When registering, voters’ ID documents are scanned by “Zip-Zip” machines to capture the barcode and then receive a registration receipt showing the voting district in which they have applied for registration. -SAnews.gov.za