The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) is creating functionality in the form of application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide election data in realtime to stakeholders including politicians, media institutions and other interested parties.
These APIs are being developed to provide data regarding elections for the interested parties’ own use as well as dissemination to third parties and the public on their own platforms including web sites, mobile applications and social media.
The release of the API functionality for the 2014 elections will be implemented over three phases:
Phase A is the voter release, which is live now, and includes access to the following information:
* Am I Registered? – functionality to check voter registration status, including their voting station details;
* Voting Station Finder – functionality which will enable citizens to identify their correct voting districts and voting stations;
* Special Votes – functionality to track the status of special votes applications;
* Who Is My Ward Council – functionality to obtain ward councillor name and contact details;
* Notifications for Out of Country Voting – functionality to track the status of voter application to notify the Chief Electoral Officer about their intensions to vote outside the Republic Of South Africa; and
* What If I Vote At? – functionality to indicate the impact of voting at a particular voting station, indication the risk of losing a provincial ballot.
Phase B, in pilot now and due to go live on 21 April, is the National and Provincial Elections 2014 Release, and includes access to the following:
* Who are the Candidates – functionality provide contestants per ballot paper and/or candidate list, per party and/or per province;
* Elections Results (National and Provincial) – provide elections results as soon as they are available, enquiries could be nationally, provincially, by municipality, by voting district and/or by political party; and
* Seat Calculation and Allocation (NPE) – functionality provides seat calculation and seat allocations data based on the elections results, that is, it indicates how many seats a party has won (seat calculation), provides the names of candidates who have won seats (seat allocation), per party, per province, per regional list and/or national.
Phase C, which will go live on 2 May, relates to the Local Government Elections 2016 and will include the following:
* Elections Results (Local Government) – functionality provides elections results as soon as they are available, enquiries could be nationally, provincially, by municipality, by ward, by voting district and/or by political party; and
* Seat Calculation and Allocation (LGE) – functionality provides seat calculation and seat allocations based on the elections results, that is, it indicates how many seats a party has won (seat calculation), provides the names of candidates who have won seats (seat allocation), per party, per municipality and/or ward;
The APIs are available at https://api.elections.org.za/. They require a user name and password to return data; all requests for a user name and password should be routed to webmaster@elections.org.za.