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Elections in the US and South Africa provide important lessons in liberal democracy

John Stremlau
By John Stremlau
11 Nov 2024
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Comparisons of the final terms of Cyril Ramaphosa and Donald Trump should be instructive for analysts interested in the evolution of two countries still struggling to recover from the centuries-long rules of illiberal white nationalism and their difficult transitions to diverse and inclusive liberal democracy.

This year’s elections in South Africa and America will affect the democratic development in the two nations in ways difficult to predict. One fundamental of liberal democracy in both nations, however, is more secure: the peaceful integrity of inclusive voting, a vital if insufficient condition for the sustainable development of liberal democracy.

In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa on 2 June accepted the results affirmed by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC). And he conceded that, for the first time in 30 years of multiracial democratic elections, the ruling African National Congress had lost its majority.

Since no party would be able to form a government on its own, he declared that the election’s “over-arching mandate” was “to work in partnership with each other and with society more broadly, to build a country that is inclusive, united, and prosperous”.

America has gone through a different process, having run gradually more inclusive elections for 236 years. Only once, in 2020, did the Republican Party’s loser Donald J Trump, accuse the few states where the election was close, of “rigging” the result.

He instigated unprecedented violence by his supporters in a failed attempt to block the certification of his opponent, President-elect Joe Biden’s election. It is important to note, however, that the American courts rejected as false all of Trump’s claims, much as the Electoral Court in South Africa rejected Jacob Zuma’s claim of rigging the 2024 vote.

But in the 2024 election where Trump was competing for the third time – his second success – Democratic Party opponent, Vice-President Kamala Harris, immediately conceded as did Hillary Clinton in a closer race against Trump in the 2016 vote.  

Following his defeat in the 2020 US election, Secretary of State in the hotly contested swing state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, taped a call from then President Trump in which Trump asked him to find enough votes to help him win the 2020 election. Raffensperger refused and was determined to institute even greater safeguards of electoral integrity in 2024.

On 14 October 2024, Raffensperger outlined in an interview with The Washington Post the steps he had taken to ensure a peaceful and credible election in Georgia.

The next day, South Africa’s IEC Deputy Chief Electoral Officer: Electoral Operations Masego Sheburi outlined to a meeting on electoral integrity convened by the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa a theme that was substantively very similar to Raffensperger’s. Their main themes were identical – each was committed to facilitating peaceful non-partisan elections within the legal guidelines stipulated in their respective constitutions.

Election integrity


Last week my wife and I were in Georgia as a two-person team of non-partisan observers representing the Carter Center. We were assigned to observe election-day voting in five predominantly black precincts in south Atlanta.

Although this exposure to the 2024 US election was very limited, it did provide insights at the grassroots level that confirmed the overall result. And that in Georgia, as in the country at large, we have concluded that US elections are conducted with the integrity that voters in South Africa expect.

We witnessed competent, courageous and congenial poll agents, a finding that the observers found throughout hotly contested Fulton County (the Carter Center’s preliminary report is pending). We have no doubt of the accuracy of Trump’s election win in Georgia. The Carter Center further validated this conclusion by conducting risk-limiting post-election audits for all counties in Georgia.

Unlike South Africa’s singular electoral system, managed by one IEC, each of the 50 states comprising the federal US has its own electoral management for local and national elections. After holding 59 increasingly inclusive presidential elections, only Trump and his populist supporters in 2020 have questioned the integrity of the result.  

An apt comparison to a similar populist autocratic leader would be former president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma. Zuma was democratically removed from office by Parliament, then controlled solely by the ANC, and replaced by Ramaphosa, who this year began his second five-year term as President of a 10-party GNU.

Comparisons of the final terms of Ramaphosa and Trump should be instructive for analysts interested in the evolution of two countries still struggling to recover from the centuries-long rules of illiberal white nationalism and their difficult transitions to diverse and inclusive liberal democracy.

But to reiterate the premise of this piece: peaceful elections accessible to all citizens is a necessary but insufficient condition for sustainable liberal democracy.

Both nations have robust and constitutionally protected freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the rule of law that all help to ensure electoral integrity, inclusion, and public accountability.

But in Georgia, Secretary Raffensperger felt that the risk of violence in 2024 justified the deterrent of police and other security forces to polling stations. At all the stations we observed there was enhanced security. Beyond two bomb threats of unknown origin in Atlanta, in our area voting proceeded peacefully, as was the case in the rest of the country despite Trump’s prior warnings of fraud.

Ironically, the very perpetrator of the violence that could have derailed democracy in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and threatened violence if he lost this election, has been peacefully and legitimately re-elected. This is small consolation to his Democratic opponents.

But the peaceful transfer of power, a necessary if insufficient condition for the sustainable democratic development of America, has been sustained, as it was reaffirmed this year in democratic South Africa. DM

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