COLUMN ONE : S. Africa’s Electoral Colleges : Voter-education groups are trying to help millions of first-timers learn to mark a ballot or overcome confusion and fear. The stakes are high--any taint on the April elections could spell trouble.

SPRINGS, South Africa — Democracy clearly is a bit daunting to the workers on the afternoon shift at the giant Impala Platinum Ltd. refinery here.

Eighteen men sit in a small sports pavilion, listening patiently as Vincent Ngcobo explains their rights and responsibilities when South Africa goes to the polls next month for the first election in which blacks will be able to vote after 340 years of white rule.

These men are black. Their questions are to the point.

Since Ngcobo keeps referring to the national election and the new National Assembly, does that mean they must vote for President Frederik W. de Klerk’s National Party? Should they mark an X on the ballot for the party they want--or against the party they don’t like? Does an X, which many illiterate people use for a signature, mean they can be identified later?

“Your vote is secret,” Ngcobo, a trainer for one of scores of non-governmental voter-education groups, assures them in English, Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho.

Elphus Mokoena, a 29-year-old machinist, is convinced. He plans to drive four hours to vote in his home village. “If I don’t vote, maybe my party will only lose by one vote,” he says later.

With the April 26-28 vote fast approaching, a fierce election fever has swept the land. Although headlines focus on South Africa’s continuing violence and on the daily campaigning by De Klerk and his chief rival, African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, the critical challenge lies behind the scenes in scores of voter-education programs like this one.

About 22.5 million South Africans will be eligible to vote--up to 18 million for the first time. And nearly half of those newly enfranchised blacks are functionally illiterate. But with a long and confusing ballot offering a choice of 26 national and provincial parties, concern is growing that many voters will be too scared to vote or will inadvertently spoil their paper ballots, undermining the legitimacy of this country’s most momentous day.

Mock elections at factories, shopping malls, sports stadiums, farms and mines around the country suggest that more than 2 million ballots may be spoiled, most from poor, rural, uneducated blacks who would be expected to back the ANC.

“Our mock elections and workshops show 15% to 20% spoiled ballots,” warned Jesse Maluleke, election coordinator for COSATU, the nation’s largest labor federation. “And that’s frightening.”

He added: “We don’t have much time left. And there hasn’t been much progress in voter literacy.”

The most extensive poll ever done in South Africa, based on 8,004 interviews, also produced unsettling results. In mock elections, one in 10 blacks accidentally invalidated a ballot. That number rose to 28% in rural regions. And not all mistakes came from illiterate voters.

“Some people simply wrote, ‘I don’t know how to vote’ ” on the ballots, said Susan Booysen, who directed the poll for the Matla Trust, the largest of the country’s scores of voter-education groups. “The confusion level is very, very high.”

The survey was conducted before last month’s decision by the ANC and the government, later ratified by the Parliament, that each voter will get two ballots in order to pick separate parties for the national and provincial assemblies. The change came after months of teaching voters to use one ballot.

“We can really expect a lot more confusion when people are issued with two ballots,” Booysen predicted. The mock elections, for example, now show that many people think the second ballot is for their second choice.

The switch to two ballots also has caused a logistics nightmare. Millions of printed pamphlets, posters, comic books and other voter-education materials, some printed in the country’s 11 major languages, were suddenly out of date.

A “How to Vote” video, shown on TV, in churches and in union halls, had to be quickly redone. So did sections of a 13-part TV series called “Khululeka,” the Zulu word for freedom, that had been in production for more than a year.

“One of the biggest problems is the uncertainty” of recent political developments, said Barry Gilder, head of the Independent Forum for Electoral Education, an umbrella group of 40 non-governmental organizations running voter programs. “The date, the details of the election, the use of two ballots--all these are causing problems.”

So is overcoming the legacy of the ruthless apartheid-era bureaucracy, which left millions of blacks without proper identification documents. Hundreds of thousands of people have lined up for voter IDs in recent weeks.

Then there’s the huge national ballot. With 17 parties listed, it will be longer than this newspaper page. Anyone with $20,000 and a signed application could register, and several newly formed parties had little more than that. There’s KISS--The Keep It Straight and Simple party--for example, and SOCCER, the Sports Organization for Collective Contributions and Equal Rights.

“The list is too long,” complained the Rev. Sam Xontana, a Matla Trust organizer in Klerksdorp in the western Transvaal. “It confuses people.”

A lottery selected how the national parties will be listed. Mandela’s ANC is No. 12. But it follows, all in a row, a series of little-known parties with similar sounding names: the Africa Muslim Party, the African Christian Democratic Party, the African Democratic Movement and, until recently, the African Moderate Congress.

The ANC formally protested that the previously unheard-of AMC had to change its name to avoid a mix-up. It did change--to the African Moderate Congress Party, or AMCP.

Election specialists warn of other problems. The new South Africa will have nine provinces instead of the current four. Each province will have its own new capital, legislature and government.

“Explaining the difference between regional and national governments is very hard when you have to first tell people how to do an X,” said Michael Goldberg, a program officer with Project Vote, based in Cape Town.

To help them, the ballots will list each party’s name, initials and symbol as well as a color photo of its standard-bearer. Any mark that shows a voter’s clear intention--an X, a check, even a circle around the picture--will be counted.

Voters who are illiterate, blind or in need of other assistance may ask an election official for help in marking the ballot. “But that’s a problem too,” Goldberg said. “We’ve been telling everyone this is a secret ballot.”

More ominous are regular reports of deliberate intimidation and disinformation. De Klerk’s campaign rallies have been disrupted repeatedly by chanting, spitting, stone-throwing mobs of ANC supporters. At least eight ANC offices have been bombed or torched.

And millions of black voters remain inaccessible to voter-education groups and campaigners alike, particularly those who live on farms run by right-wing whites and in and around the KwaZulu homeland controlled by Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.

Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party is boycotting the election, and political violence between his more militant followers and local ANC members has claimed thousands of lives in recent years. They include 15 young ANC election workers who were massacred Feb. 19 in southern Natal province after they had put up posters for a voter workshop.

“The lack of free canvassing will be a factor, and may be a crucial factor,” in any determination of whether the elections are free and fair, warned Judge Johann Kriegler, chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, which is the official election watchdog and will certify the final results.

Kriegler said that access and intimidation worry him far more than ruined ballots. “The experience in many other countries, such as Angola, shows the percentage of spoiled ballots is often far lower than many people, particularly Westerners, expect. . . . The fact that someone is illiterate doesn’t mean someone is stupid,” he said.

Still, voting here won’t be simple. It entails 12 steps, including producing valid identity documents and getting them stamped. Voters will also have their hands marked with ultraviolet-sensitive ink, so no one can vote twice, before they can mark the sacred X on the two ballot papers.

No one seems to know how much is being spent for voter education, but estimates reach at least $40 million, not including free air time on state-run radio and TV. Most funding comes from governments in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. The U.S. Agency for International Development alone has earmarked $35 million for election-related assistance, including $20 million for voter education.

The bonanza has sparked a feeding frenzy among potential recipients, according to the head of one non-governmental group who asked not to be identified. “It’s a very avaricious scene,” she said. “Everybody wants a piece of the action.”

Not all the money is well spent. Many scheduled workshops, street theater performances and other election events, especially in the squalid squatter camps and slum townships where most blacks live, run into problems.

The Matla Trust, for example, recently announced a workshop and mock election in Tswelelang, a rural township with dirt roads and no running water 150 miles southwest of Johannesburg. A popular local minister had promised to publicize the occasion at his Sunday service and to book a local sports stadium.

“It’s a fiasco,” trainer Dolos Luka, 35, said angrily after arriving with a reporter at the locked church and empty stadium. “The priest did nothing.” He shrugged. “This happens a lot.”

Still, the country is awash in TV and radio spots, billboards, newspaper ads and graffiti promoting the election. Thousands of minivans used as taxis play voter-education tapes; appliance stores screen voter videos on their TVs, and theater groups perform educational skits.

One of the more unusual groups is Prophets of the City, a popular black rap band that has begun free “Rapping for Democracy” performances at township high schools, where many students are over 18 and thus eligible to vote.

About 1,300 wide-eyed students at Thomas Mofolo High School in Soweto giggled, cheered and danced recently in the blazing midday sun when lead singer Dion (Ready D) Daniels, in baggy pants and unlaced boots, took the microphone and the music thumped and scratched from giant speakers.

“Vote for hope, it’s no joke,” he sang. “Show you care for humanity. We can’t live in a divided society!

“Don’t think if you don’t vote, you’re protected. Because some sucker will still get elected! So vote for peace, vote for hope. Yo baby, yo baby, yo baby, YO!”