AI and the battle for SA’s 2026 elections

South Africa’s 2026 local government elections may well be remembered as the country’s first truly artificial intelligence election.

- Mandla J. Radebe

Many may have said this in 2024. For instance, in my chapter, ‘AI, Governance and Public Policy: Examining the 2024 South African Elections’, published in the book Designing Artificial Intelligence for Public Policy and Governance in Africa, edited by Gedion Onyango, I argued that the 2024 national elections introduced South Africans to the disruptive potential of generative AI, deepfakes, algorithmic persuasion and digital disinformation.

If this is the case, then the 2026 elections are likely to witness these technologies being deployed on a far larger scale. Political parties, civil society organisations, regulators and citizens should prepare for a dramatically altered electoral terrain, where political competition increasingly takes place not in stadiums, community halls or door-to-door campaigns but on smartphones, algorithms and digital platforms.

The central question is no longer whether AI will influence elections. It already has. The more pressing question is how profoundly it will reshape political mobilisation, voter behaviour and democratic participation.

One of the most intriguing questions emerging from the AI revolution is whether the days of big political rallies and traditional door-to-door campaigns are coming to an end.

Every South African will be familiar with the reality that local political parties traditionally measured their strength through physical mobilisation. We have become accustomed to massive rallies that serve not only as campaign events but also as demonstrations of organisational capacity and political legitimacy.

Historically, some parties have equated packed stadiums with electoral strength only to discover on election day, to their dismay, that large crowds do not translate into votes at the ballot box. Door-to-door campaigns have always been regarded as the gold standard of voter engagement.

But AI-driven campaigning is changing the political calculus.