When considering the possible use of technology, it is important to holistically assess what impact it will have on the overall quality of elections. This, in turn, requires a realistic examination of the nature of the problems for which solutions are being sought. For example, a voter registration system is ultimately no more than a tool that can be used by honest polling officials to determine whether a particular individual should be allowed to vote. Investment in new registration systems and processes will be a pointless waste of resources if the real problem is that the officials are dishonest, suborned or intimidated, and therefore hand out ballots without even referring to the register.
This may suggest that technological solutions are most appropriate for countries where elections are reasonably well run, but trust or efficiency would benefit from reinforcement, rather than in well-established democracies (where their impact on the overall election quality is likely to be marginal) or truly dire situations (where the elimination of fraud in one area of the electoral process will most likely displace it to another area).
Electoral Systems
Each type of electoral system raises different political, social and financial sustainability issues. The type of electoral system used will have a critical impact on boundary delimitation and voter registration processes, voter education and information requirements, ballot paper design and production, the number of polling days and the need for by-elections. These issues are examined in detail in International IDEA’s Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook published in 2005. For example, systems based on small electoral districts, which require specific boundary delimitation processes, separate ballot papers for each district, high precision in voter registration and the prevention of electoral fraud, and an EMB administrative structure that can deal with each electoral district as a distinct unit, may be more costly. Yet large multi-member electoral districts may involve complex and expensive vote-counting systems, may be unwieldy for an EMB to manage accurately and transparently, and may incur higher transport and other logistics costs. Proponents of each type of electoral system advance social and political sustainability arguments in their favour that need to be examined carefully against specific country conditions.
Electoral Boundary Delimitation
The frequency and form of electoral boundary delimitation processes may be reviewed to improve sustainability. Using an EMB to conduct boundary delimitation can eliminate the costs of a separate body. Yet if the government maintains a mapping office for other purposes, it may not be necessary for the EMB to duplicate that capability. Simple electronic mapping and population databases for determining electoral district boundaries, and streamlined review processes and periods, can be used to reduce costs. The adoption of multi-member electoral districts based on existing administrative boundaries can drastically reduce or even eliminate boundary delimitation costs. However, boundary delimitation is a politically sensitive issue, and must be implemented in a politically sustainable manner.
Voter Registration
The cost of compiling and maintaining the voter register can be significantly affected by the system used and its components. The method of data collection can have significant effects on both the costs and the accuracy — and hence the political sustainability — of the electoral register. For example, data may be specifically collected for voter registration or extracted from an existing database; registration may be continuous, or may be done by a national census-style exercise before an election; it may involve the EMB contacting voters, or voters having to contact the EMB; special voter ID cards may or may not be issued; and different opportunities may be provided for electors to challenge alleged inaccuracies in the electoral register. The use of technology in voter registration — in recording elector identity data such as fingerprints and photographs, in the use of bar-coded documents, in database matching to update registration records, or in the production of high-integrity polling day voter lists with photographs and/or other biometric data or bar codes, for example — will also have significant cost implications.
Maintaining accurate electoral registers is a costly task. Each EMB needs to determine which voter registration checks are necessary, and which, given levels of public trust and the controls in place to prevent polling fraud, may be redundant and can be eliminated to save money. Comparing data on the electoral register with information from other government agencies can help maintain the electoral register cost effectively, although it may raise concerns over data privacy. If the electoral register can be derived from a reliable and politically acceptable national civil registration database, as is done in Senegal and Sweden, or if records of births and deaths are computerized and accessible to the EMB, costs can be cut significantly. Continuous voter registration may, in the long run, be another measure to keep down costs.
Local conditions will be the primary factors for determining the most sustainable voter registration mechanism for a country. Permanent and continuously maintained registers will be most viable where the information needed to keep them up to date can be obtained from other government agencies that have access to accurate and publicly trusted data, or where there is a strong culture of compliance with a requirement for voters to notify the government of changes in their circumstances, such as new addresses. In the absence of both of these factors, the register will quickly become obsolete, and a periodic update process, involving major efforts to capture information, may be required.
The ease with which such intensive update operations can be mounted will be influenced by a wide range of factors, including climate; the size and geography of the country; population size, distribution and movements; language; transport, logistical, postal, communication, power supply, financial and public outreach infrastructure; availability of staff with requisite skills; availability of financial and technical resources, in both the short and long term; the political atmosphere in a country, particularly the degree of trust in electoral processes and institutions; local factors that may encourage fraudulent registration, including political or financial motivations for creating false identities; security concerns; procurement timelines; storage and distribution constraints; and constraints of any kind that could compromise participation by women or members of minority groups. If election dates are fixed and far apart, the effort required to keep registers continuously accurate may be unnecessary. If, however, a constituency-based electoral system is used, and frequent by-elections are required between general elections to fill casual vacancies, it might be deemed appropriate to maintain a continuous register.
The Polling Process
The preparation for and conduct of polling at a general election or referendum in any country is a significant national event, requiring a considerable budget to be implemented effectively. Careful assessment of how many polling stations, how many staff and what associated materials are necessary for each election can help reduce costs. If security, integrity and effective levels of service can be assured, polling stations in higher population density areas could be amalgamated, providing significant cost savings. Improved allocations of duties to staff, polling station layouts and staff training may make it possible to reduce the ratio of polling station staff to voters without reducing service levels. Countries that conduct polling over two or more days may also consider whether keeping the polling stations open for longer on a single day would cut costs. Any proposed reductions in voting days or hours need to be considered against patterns of working hours so as not to exclude any class of electors from voting.
Improving voter access and extending common facilities to voters, such as postal voting (as in Australia and Spain), external voting, and the provision of special services for voting in prisons, ships and hospitals, has obliged EMBs to offer relatively higher-cost services to electors. These activities, particularly if they involve large-scale or geographically dispersed absentee voting for refugees or others — as in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Iraq and Tunisia — may be a burden on the financial sustainability of electoral processes. However, increases in election costs need to be weighed against the EMB’s social responsibilities and the additional political legitimacy gained from enabling these voters to exercise their franchise. In any operation of this type, there is a risk that low take-up rates will enable critics to point to extremely high costs per voter, which can make support for such processes difficult to sustain. In Australia, electronic voting systems implemented in 2007 for the benefit of the blind and sight impaired, and for military forces overseas, were ultimately abandoned on cost grounds.
The worldwide growth of the Internet has raised the question of whether remote Internet voting could better meet the needs of wide classes of voters. On the whole, the extent of use of the Internet in the act of voting has not matched its rise in most other fields of human endeavour; Estonia is the only country in which national electoral processes have been essentially Internet based. This reflects considerable ongoing controversy, driven by both technical and sociological concerns, over whether remote Internet voting meets the basic tests of secrecy, security and integrity.
A perceived requirement to support a range of different voting modalities for voters with varying needs can place a particular burden on the area of an EMB responsible for the development and implementation of policies relating to polling and counting: each different modality is likely to require a discrete set of procedures, instructions and training materials, for example, and the work involved will be essentially independent of the number of voters that is likely to use a particular modality.
Training EMB staff can be expensive, and is often a cost that governments or EMBs see as a relatively painless cut when reviewing election budgets. Inadequate training, however, is likely to result in greater financial and political costs through poor staff performance — perhaps affecting the credibility of the electoral process — and to have a long-term effect on the reputation and sustainability of the EMB.
