Donor support may improve the quality of an election, and in some cases may even be necessary for it occur. However, for many EMBs, donor support has implications for the sustainable delivery of free and fair elections – see the case studies of Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Fiji, Lesotho, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Yemen.

While donor support may include budgetary contributions and technical assistance, including advanced technologies, some donors avoid supporting EMBs’ recurrent budgets, that is, core personnel costs and rental of buildings and furniture, as well as other non-technical items, such as motor vehicles and fuel. Donor assistance sometimes is accompanied by a tied aid concept whereby the recipient EMB is required to purchase goods and services from nationals of the donor concerned. Often the costs of purchasing from external vendors may be considerably higher, inflating overall electoral costs. New technologies may have significant long-term cost implications for the EMB, for example for maintenance or payment of regular licencing fees for software. Introducing donor-driven technological solutions may create political demands for progressively greater dependence on externally provided technology, as experienced with voter registration in Haiti.

In some post-conflict situations such as those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, and Liberia, donors contribute almost the entire cost of the transitional elections. In such cases, subsequent elections are unable to achieve the same level of funding and will offer a lower level of election services, which may lead to dissatisfaction with those subsequent elections. This raises obvious issues of creating transitional structures that the local authorities can ‘buy into’ subsequently, and building the necessary expertise to generate the financial resources to conduct future elections. In other post-conflict situations, outside support may be vital, but it may not be politically or economically desirable for outside authorities to assume ownership of organizing and conducting the transitional elections: Afghanistan and Iraq may fall into this category. Failed states and failed EMBs may also require considerable outside assistance from various donors; sometimes the UN plays a coordinating role, as in Liberia in 2004–2005.

The CORE study from 2005 notes that Cambodia, which in 1993 relied on donor assistance for up to 80 per cent of its election budget, has reduced its donor dependence to less than 50 per cent during the 2003 elections. Although it is desirable to transfer skills to local election officials during the transitional election period, in practice this goal has seldom been satisfactorily achieved, so capacity-building is likely to be a continuing need in post-transitional elections. In post-conflict environments, the initial external assistance is vital to restore democracy and stability, but unless considerable donor assistance continues in the medium term, to continue to develop EMB capabilities, both the electoral process and democracy itself may experience reverses.

New technologies can help to improve the quality of electoral processes, especially where large amounts of data have to be processed quickly, as in delimitation of electoral districts, electoral registration, the voting and vote-counting process, and the general computerization of the administrative machinery. An increasing number of EMBs are entering the field of electronic voting and counting of votes. Even some self-sustaining EMBs, for example in Costa Rica, find it necessary to rely on outside assistance to fund the introduction of new technology (see the case study). Opinions are divided on the question of the sustainability of funding voting computerization, Internet and telecommunication services, and other electoral technology such as scanners and biometrics for voter registration. Aspects to be considered by EMBs and donors include:

1. the comparative financial, social, and political costs/benefits of using donor assistance for funding new technology as against using it for other electoral assistance programmes;
2. the life of the technology: will the equipment require similarly expensive replacement at the next electoral event or will it be useful in years and elections to come;
3. capacities for local maintenance of the technology. If there is no technical or financial capacity to maintain the internationally provided hardware or software, or skills transferred to allow local operation once the international advisers have gone, internationally provided technology can be a very expensive single-use solution;
4. the potential for making the technology available for use by other government or societal organisations after the electoral event; or even loaning it to other countries for their elections; and
5. training for temporary electoral staff using internationally provided technology that can be transferred to their post-electoral work environments.