Cape Town - The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has been commended by MPs for its remarkable work both at home and on the African continent.
One after the other, MPs said that the IEC had made them "proud" as an entity tasked with handling the country's elections, the latest being the successful 2011 municipal elections.
Apart from its good work, the organisation was also congratulated for receiving an unqualified audit opinion from the Auditor-General.
Last year, the IEC received a bad report, and this has been seen as an improvement.
IEC commissioners, led by chief electoral officer Advocate Pansy Tlakula and chairperson Dr Brigalia Bam, presented their annual report on Thursday before Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs.
Despite a good report, Tlakula said that they would improve on risk management, streamline their strategic objectives and monitor performance information as noted by the AG.
She conceded that they were struggling with monitoring performance information as it was a new area required of them to look at.
However, she said they now had put in place a "reporting tool" for that purpose and expected better results in future.
Reflecting on the recent municipal elections, Tlakula said that they registered 23.6 million voters, surpassing their 23.3 million target.
She also told MPs that they undertook study tours to Brazil, India and Mexico in order to learn from their electronic voting system.
Bam said this year's municipal elections had seen 37 percent of women being elected as councillors.
Challenging political parties, she said that this was not enough as they should elect more women as candidates in future.
She said that in the past 14 years, the trend has been that more young people have registered to vote.
Over all, she said that more women, in both rural and urban areas, had been registered to vote, compared to men.
Unlike other countries, she said that the country now needed programmes targeting men to urge them to register to vote.
On a related matter, after years of working for the IEC, Bam told the committee that she was retiring.
She thanked the committee for its guidance and saying that she would miss coming to report on their work to Parliament.
On a lighter note, she indicated that it was unnerving to come before the committee as their questions were always difficult.
Bam, who has been with been the IEC chairperson for over a decade, is also distinguished as having made major contributions to the upliftment of women and to democracy-building in South Africa.
