Please note that I write here in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are not those of my employer.

Following last week’s post in which I imagined the results of a mixed-member proportional electoral system with single-member constituencies, I thought it would also be interesting to look at the electoral system proposed in 2003 by the Report of the Electoral Task Team, also known as the “Van Zyl Slabbert Report”.

Please note that I write here in my personal capacity. The views expressed here are not those of my employer.

The 2024 election is behind us, but there is still discussion about electoral reform following the introduction of independent candidates and the separate regional ballot. Consequently I thought it would be interesting to update my imagined demarcation of single-member constituencies for 2024.

Since 2013, a website I developed has provided information on places from the South African National Census of 2011. Recently I’ve developed a GraphQL API to make that data available to other developers. In parallel with this API development, I’ve also added some extra data, and made some changes to the website. Read on for more details.

I’ve updated my Western Cape number plate map from 2014 to include the new CAA code for Cape Town.

This post presents a selection of maps I have produced in the last few weeks. If you follow me on Twitter or on Reddit you will have seen most of these already. All the images below are clickable thumbnails which link to a full-size version.

Five years ago, after the 2014 general election, I built an interactive map of the election results. Since then the state of the technology for web mapping has moved on, so I’ve developed a completely new version. This new map uses vector tiles for better rendering, includes results for four general elections (2004–2019), and allows you to drill all the way down to voting district level. And here it is.

The linguistic diversity index measures the probability that two people selected at random from a population speak different home languages. The map below, which I produced, depicts the linguistic diversity index calculated on a 10-kilometre-wide hexagonal grid across South Africa.

I’ve made an interactive website with six sets of topographic maps of Cape Town and surrounds covering the period from 1940 to 2010. You can zoom in and move around the maps, switching from one era to another.

The post-apartheid political map of South Africa might well have looked quite different. The Eastern Cape might have been divided into two provinces, with the Kat River and Great Fish River on the boundary. The Northern Cape might not have existed, with the Western Cape meeting North West at the Orange River. Gauteng might have been much bigger – or much smaller. The Western Cape might have stopped south of Citrusdal – or it might have incorporated all of Namaqualand.

After the recent US Supreme Court ruling legalising same-sex marriage (SSM) throughout that country, a claim was recently brought up on a Wikipedia talk page that more than one billion people now live in countries (or states/provinces) where SSM is legal. I thought I’d check out the numbers, and update my old graph showing how this has changed over time.