Voter registration is the process of verifying potential voters, and entering their names and other substantiating information on a voters list. For registration to be fair, comprehensive and inclusive, potential voters must be aware of the registration process and have reasonable opportunity to complete it. Voter education campaigns foster the necessary awareness by emphasizing the importance of registration, explaining citizens’ responsibilities in becoming registered, and presenting information on how to complete the registration process.

Inclusiveness

Registration must be inclusive – that is, accessible to all groups and categories of eligible citizens. There should be no systemic bias against any identifiable group. However, social or economic status makes registration more difficult for some citizens, such as:

• residents of rural areas
• people with low literacy levels
• people who are economically disenfranchised or homeless
• people who face cultural biases against their participation in politics and public affairs (e.g. women)

Special measures may be required to break down barriers and make the registration system truly open to these groups, enabling them to take part in the democratic process. Electoral exclusion works through formal as well as informal mechanisms; dealing with them takes bona fide efforts on the part of electoral administrators.

Administrative Exclusion of Eligible Voters

Working against inclusiveness is the administrative exclusion of eligible voters. They may be administratively excluded when the registration system does not encourage or facilitate their registration, and particularly when administrative barriers exist for eligible citizens to register to vote. Voters may be administratively disenfranchised in various ways, all of which endanger electoral legitimacy. Following are some of the causes of administrative disenfranchisement and possible solutions.

• Deadline. The registration deadline falls early in the election period, when interest may be low. The solution is to extend the deadline so that more people can register, and perhaps to make provisions for registration at the polls on election day.
• Cost. Registration is expensive. People wishing to register must pay fees, for example, for voter identification cards. A solution would be to avoid passing costs of voter registration on to individual citizens wherever possible. Otherwise, poorer citizens are placed at a disadvantage and will be selectively disenfranchised.
• Investment of time. Registration is time-consuming. Citizens sometimes must travel long distances to register, losing work hours and incurring heavy travel expenses. The solution may be to increase the number of registration locations and perhaps to use mobile voter registration centres.

Voluntary Versus Mandatory Registration

Is voter registration an obligation and responsibility of citizenship, or is it a right of citizenship to be exercised at the discretion of each individual? The answer to this question determines the administrative procedures to be put in place for voter registration. If the prevailing view is that voting is an obligation and responsibility of citizenship, it follows that registration should be mandatory. In that case the state must make voters aware that they are required to register or to update their information on the continuous voters list. If voting is viewed as a right rather than an obligation, registration is an option to be exercised by voters at their own discretion. Consequently, the state need not make the same effort to encourage voters to register.

Who Is Responsible - Citizens or the State?

Different systems may use differing registration methods and assign varying responsibilities to electoral administrators and citizens. Sometimes registration is primarily the responsibility of citizens, who must initiate the process by contacting the election administration. In other cases, officials are responsible for maintaining continuous voters lists or developing new lists. They may meet their responsibility by conducting door-to-door enumeration or establishing local registration centres.

In practice, the responsibility is often shared. For example, in a country with a continuous voters list, the election authority may make registration accessible by establishing thousands of voter registration centres, including mobile units. It is still up to citizens, however, to visit the registration sites and formally initiate their registration.

Where voters initiate registration, experience has shown that greater convenience can significantly increase participation. In the final analysis, it is a question of access: how much responsibility does the state have for enabling citizens to register without undue hardship? The answer is that the state must assume considerable responsibility for ensuring that registration is not an administrative barrier to citizens’ participation in democratic elections. At the same time, cost is usually a factor in deciding on the scale of voter registration efforts.

Performance Criteria

Clear performance criteria help to measure overall utility and cost-effectiveness of a voter registration system. For periodic voters lists, the criteria would include accuracy and comprehensiveness, or completeness. Comprehensiveness is measured by the proportion of eligible voters included on the voters list. Accuracy is measured by the rate of error in entering data on individual voters (name, address, gender, age, citizenship and any other variable). With a continuous voters list or a civil registry, accuracy often depends on the currency of data – that is, whether the information is updated in timely fashion. The primary concern is that on election day the most recent data changes should appear in the list so that it contains information reflecting voters’ current circumstances.

Specific performance targets for each area will promote better voter registration. One senior election official suggests that a continuous list should aim to be 90 percent complete, 85 percent current and 97 percent accurate. In other words, the system should be expected to have 9 out of 10 eligible citizens on the list, current information on voters in 8.5 instances out of 10, and data entry errors in only 3 records out of 100. Once these targets or benchmarks are identified, the incremental costs for achieving them can be calculated.

As the proportion of registered voters increases, however, and as efforts are made to meet the other performance targets, the marginal cost of registering additional voters escalates. The first voter registrations are relatively inexpensive: voters may have been at home when the enumerators called, or they responded without delay to a mailed request for updated information. If they had no changes to record, the information about them on the voters list remained current and accurate. In the case of potential voters who do not satisfy these conditions, the costs of gathering and updating data may rise. Also, it may take more than one attempt to contact some voters who are difficult to reach. The more comprehensive, accurate and current the voters list becomes, therefore, the more expensive it will be to produce.

For example, some countries maintain a continuous list including voters who live abroad. If the target is 90 percent for comprehensiveness, they may find the expense prohibitive. A cost-conscious solution might be to develop a separate registration system for nationals living abroad – a practice followed by some countries. Instead of being kept on the active domestic voters lists, citizens living abroad must register at their own initiative for each electoral event.

Concerning currency of information such as the addresses of voters listed in the register, different areas of a country commonly have quite different rates of residential mobility. People may move more often in densely populated urban centres, and the mobility or transience rate may be high among younger voters such as college students. Ensuring an 85 percent currency rate would probably require more frequent updating of the voters list in certain areas; in others, the list might remain current at that performance level for considerably longer. For this reason, national (or regional) average mobility rates may prove more useful than highly localized rates.

Cost and its Relation to Performance Criteria

The better the performance on these three criteria, the higher will be the cost of a voter registration system. Obviously, it costs less to register the “easiest” potential voters than the more “difficult” ones. Difficult-to-register voters may:

• live in remote areas
• change their address frequently
• have no real permanent address
• not return registration forms promptly

At some point, the cost of registering such voters may even become prohibitive. Exactly where that point is reached will vary for each jurisdiction.