Migration is critical for policy agendas and government planning as it changes the
demographic composition of towns, cities and regions – this requires adjustments to
service and infrastructure provision. To develop suitable policy responses, reliable,
comparable and timely information is required. Obvious sources of migration data are
the national census and household and labour surveys. Socio-economic data have
not dealt well with migration. A recent CSIR research project, Spatial and Temporal
Evidence for Planning in South Africa1
(StepSA), explored the use of voter registration
information as an alternative source of migration data. Anonymised voter registration
data were provided by the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa for
several consecutive elections covering a 12-year period. The data, once spatialised
(and related to a single set of voting districts), could then be processed to extract
movement trends between different election periods. This article describes the process
applied and the initial analyses conducted.