On 17 March 2022, Mbali Ntuli terminated her 15-year-long membership of the Democratic Alliance, and walked away from the KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature. She was offered wads of cash to start another political party, but founded a civic organisation that empowers people to hold political parties accountable instead.
She launched the Ground Work Collective (GWC) a year after quitting formal politics. Through several initiatives, the organisation aims to strengthen democracy in South Africa. One of those is ‘Protect Our Democracy’, a programme that sent more than 3,000 election observers to polling stations to monitor the 2024 national and provincial elections.
“They’re the eyes and ears of democracy,” Vincent Maake, spokesperson of GWC, says about election observers. “They make sure that everything runs smoothly — voting stations open on time, there [are] adequate ballot papers, ink, and there are no issues on the day.”
South Africa has regularly held free and fair elections since 1994. For an election to be deemed “free”, voters must be able to choose their preferred candidate without coercion. It is deemed “fair” if all registered parties are able to participate equally.
Election observers play a key role in ensuring the process is free and fair. According to the Open Election Data Initiative, “citizen election observation helps ensure electoral integrity, and strengthens civil society’s capacity to promote citizen participation, engage in policy advocacy and foster governmental accountability within and well beyond the election cycle”.
While the GWC may not be able to deploy independent observers in every one of the more than 23,000 voting stations in the country, they have identified 949 “red zones”.
Maake says: “The reason why we’re focusing on the red zones [is because] that’s where there’s the likelihood of anything going wrong. We want to be in those stations to make sure we keep those stations in check”.
GWC plans to recruit and deploy more than 7,000 election observers for the upcoming municipal elections, scheduled to be held on 4 November. Individuals must be at least 18 years old, be a South African citizen and may not be a member of any political party.
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Image via Polity.
