With this weekend (26-27 January) being the IEC’s final registration weekend for voters, its important for South Africans to quickly and easily find their nearest voting station.
The IEC has launched a useful online Voting Station Finder tool (http://maps.elections.org.za/vsfinder/), but some of the physical addresses for voting stations are either incomplete or missing altogether.
However, a new South African web site, www.overhere.co.za, could hold the answer. It allows voters to convert the GPS co-ordinates (latitudes and longitudes) found on the IEC’s website into more user-friendly mapcodes that can be decoded back to pinpoint address locations on the same website. T
In addition, the new ‘Live’ feature will also help South Africans on the ground at polling stations to generate a mapcode for their precise location on their GPS-equipped cellphones, then share that link in a format that can be used by popular mapping systems like Google Maps or Waze.
“The IEC is to be commended for an extremely effective online approach in 2019, and without a doubt the problems experienced with physical addresses are not theirs alone – most of South Africa features physical addresses which are either hard to decipher, non-existent or impossible to find without an intimate knowledge of the local area,” explains the founder of OverHere.co.za, Leon Schnell.
“This is just one of countless use cases where mapcodes (as a free and open-source technology that can be integrated into any web site or addressing solution) can and will save the day, by transforming all unaddressable locations into short mapcodes with an accuracy of within 5 meters to 7 meters.”