South Africa votes: 7 digital tools to help keep you informed ahead of May 7

South African citizens are heading to the polls on 7 May. Let’s be honest, while democracy and the functions of inner-government are incredibly important for determining the quality of our lives, they’re almost always quite boring. If you’re not a political enthusiast, it’s easy to have your attention swayed by a little fluffy kitten online with an essential don’t-give-a-sh*t attitude about the whole ordeal.

Fortunately, there are a few tools that make it possible for you to be informed and easily updated before you grab that ballot paper. We’ve rounded up a few — but this is by no means an exhaustive list. If we’ve left anything out, let us know in the comments.

Where is my voting station?

First off, there’s the Electoral Commision of South Africa’s site which provides detailed information about voter registration, relative news and dates and useful tools such as the Voting Station Finder.

If you’re not into sifting through stats, there’s a neat online mapping system that lets you search any address in South Africa which then locates the ballot station you’re meant to cast your vote at.

Rep Locator

You need to know who your votes are putting into office, right? Another useful resource, the People’s Assembly website, has a tool called Find Your Representative that can help. The map not only shows you who is in which constituency office and who the national representatives are, it also shows you report cards of the office representatives. Each member of parliament has a dedicated profile that shows you everything from parliament appearances to political interests, so you almost know exactly where you stand with the person sitting in office. It’s something of a Facebook for MPs really.

Apart from this Rep Locator, the People’s Assembly also hosts a mountain of information about the ins-and-outs about parliament, provinces, elections and democracy in general. The site’s also easy to read and updated regularly.

Know Your Hood

Developed by Code for South Africa, a data-driven NGO that aims to empower citizens, Know Your Hood aims to give you more insight into your home town and suburb. The tool, which now sits on the M&G’s site, allows you to check how many people have voted for certain political parties in your area in the previous 2009 elections. So you just punch in your address and it churns out the amount of registered voters in your area and how many votes went to which party.

It’s a work in progress, but the aim is for it to eventually be an app that provides information about any South African neighbourhood aggregated from the national census, IEC, crime statistics and so forth. Something definitely worth looking out for in the future.

Google’s Election Hub

With a known thirst for information distribution, Google has recently launched the election hub for South Africa’s upcoming voting season. Google has launched this service, which aims to keep voters well-informed and educated, in over 40 countries thus far. The platform keeps track of online trends, manifestos, the latest news and general issues of concern. It also shows you how the social media political campaigns are doing. As we’ve seen, some parties’ YouTube uptake has been quite strong recently.

News 24 elections app

Looking for information, interesting visualisations and the chance to follow your favourite party? News24 has put together a powerful app for Android and iOS that allows you to keep up to date of news about your chosen political powerhouses, track down your nearest voting station through Google Maps integration and read up more about party leaders and election tips, among other things. You can also see interactive maps which break down the previous election results by province and ward, and track how voting preferences have shifted since 1994.

SA Votes
Mail & Guardian’s special edition app is designed to keep you informed before you place that x on your ballot paper. To do that, the newspaper has created a mobile (Android and iOS) hub for all its elections coverage — news, opinion and multimedia are all available in one app. There are also polls where you can voice your views with a quick tap. Unfortunately, a lot of the more interesting features take you to the Mail&Guardian’s site, where you’ll receive a warning suggesting you switch to desktop or email the piece to yourself to read it later.

IEC South Africa

The country’s electoral commission has also released an official Android and iOS app (there’s also even a Windows 8 app) to help see you through May 7. You can check if you’re registered, who your ward councillor is and track down where you need to vote using the integrated maps option. The app also provides general information in a FAQ section, and provides contact details ranging from the call centre number to the commission’s Facebook page.

Never has it been easier to be more distracted than it is in today’s day and age. It’s also never been easier to scrape up trucks of data and unpack them into neat, bite-size, friendly versions to the general public.

In any case, if the numbers or the names on the ballots don’t interest you, hopefully the tech does.