Observing external voting may be difficult both because of lack of transparency in the process and because of lack of resources to be able to collect first-hand information from a wide geographical area. Observation may therefore in some cases be limited to the overall assessment of the conditions for external voting, or to parts of the processes.

The political conditions for external voting should always be assessed. If the very fact that external voting is permitted is controversial, it is likely that general trust in its implementation will be low.

External voting will always be less transparent than in-country personal voting in polling stations. Voting outside controlled environments will be less easy to observe than voting in controlled areas, and e-voting will produce fewer audit trails (such as ballot papers). Therefore general confidence in the EMB and the election administrators is the first criterion for observers to assess when observing external voting.

Should such confidence not be in place, it is difficult to create it by observing the elections. Even if part of the process can be checked, it is difficult to ensure that the process cannot be manipulated by insiders. However, if there is general trust in the intentions of the election administrators, some parts of the process are possible to check and can be observed. They include:

• the registers of external electors;
• the validation of the voters;
• the content of the ballot material used for postal votes, and the manner in which the return of voting material is checked for correctness and against impersonation;
• the way an e-voting system is procured and validated by the EMB;
• the available audit trails; and
• security measures taken against attacks from outside and against technical failure in the case of electronic voting.

In addition, the issues regarding the secrecy of the vote and the possibility of systematic intimidation of voters should be assessed.