The procedures for external voting
There are four basic options for the procedure for external voting:
The advantages of proxy voting are that it is technically simple and does not involve the huge financial and administrative costs that are customary in elections held outside the state territory. It does, however, have one problematic feature: the proxy could use this procedure to obtain an additional vote and thus infringe the principle of equal suffrage, with the electoral authorities being unable to intervene.
The main advantage of voting in diplomatic missions is that there is a highly transparent electoral process, supervised by diplomatic staff. However, they must be, and be perceived to be, independent and unbiased. Moreover, in some countries getting to the nearest embassy or consulate may be a problem, especially for citizens of those states that have few diplomatic missions in those foreign countries or in countries where the infrastructure is poor. Oversight issues also need to be considered with voting at military bases abroad.
It is clearly easier to organize postal voting than to establish polling stations in all diplomatic missions worldwide, but the transparency of voting by post is not so high as when the vote is cast in person in a consulate under the observation of state officials (problems of ‘family voting’, for instance, have been known to arise); moreover, postal services may be slow and unreliable. Whether postal voting is more or less suitable than voting in diplomatic missions will depend to a great extent on the context, such as the infrastructure of those foreign countries where external voting is to be held. The costs associated with postal voting are generally lower than those for personal voting because the management structure can be centralized for postal voting. However, due to timelines, it may be necessary to use courier services to move the ballot papers to a central point in each country for mailing, and also to return them for counting. Costs for these services are high but they ensure timely delivery. The local mailing costs are also high because the package contains ballot papers, a series of envelopes, instructions, candidate lists and so on.
Thus there is no ‘best procedure’ for external voting. The EMB will have to consider the procedure that best meets the needs of its electorate.
Timelines
The planning process is made difficult by the particular features of external voting. However, if there is early planning and careful preparation, the process will naturally parallel that of the election in-country. For external voting, however, extra time is required at the registration and voting stages, especially if the external electors are widely distributed geographically, as table 5.2 shows. A short election period can effectively exclude external voting, and is indeed sometimes used for that purpose (e.g., in Sierra Leone 2002, the timeline was one of the reasons for excluding external voting).
One of the pre-election tasks that can be time-consuming is the negotiation and signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with each country that will have external registration and voting.The MOU is the basis for all the arrangements, assistance and needs of the EMB in that country. When several countries are involved, a delayed MOU with one or more can jeopardize the process. This happened in the 2005 Iraqi election, with the last MOU being signed just four weeks before the election.
The managers of the external voting must be an integral part of the EMB’s management and planning team so that all the players are aware of the special problems to be faced and the timelines. This is particularly important if the external voting is being administered by an agency outside the EMB of the country for which the election is being held. The fact that there is external voting impacts on every step of the process—from procurement and printing to distribution of the ballot papers, and from training of election workers and voter education to procedures. Only by working closely together can the internal and external voting be consistent and function well and efficiently.
The campaign period will need special attention because candidates and political parties may not have the resources to reach external electors. The EMB may have to print and distribute information about the candidates and political parties to these electors, particularly if it is a postal vote. Although the campaign period would be the same as that for the in-country campaign, the time needed for preparation of materials has to be considered. Timelines will be affected differently depending on the locations of external electors, on the method of registration and on the process for voting. Technology is offering new options and electronic methods of voting.
Costing and budgeting
External voting can add considerably to the costs of an election. The costs of external voting will vary with the prevailing conditions. Once a decision has been made to have external voting, it is necessary to be aware of where extra funds will be needed and what the actual costs will be. In transitional elections, if international donors are involved, they will want oversight of detailed costing and budgets. All the costing factors must be known early in the process so that a realistic budget can be presented to governments and donors. When programmes are established well in advance within a recognized structure, they are likely to be less costly.
The extra costs may be a reason to limit the extent the external voting. For instance, the option of external voting may be offered only where the number of registered external electors exceeds a certain threshold (e.g. Ukraine in 2004) or only in countries where the country holding the election has an embassy or consulate. In some cases, decision makers may determine that the challenges of external voting are too costly and insurmountable against tight timetables. This has been the case in a number of post-conflict elections. Indeed, in the 2005 Iraqi elections, the United Nations initially advised against external voting due to the complexity of such an operation. However, the Iraqi political parties advocated strongly for external voting and the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) ultimately (in November 2004) decided to incorporate external voting.
External voting programme costs might include:
Many of the basic election costs for items such as procurement and printing will be included in the general election budget (e.g. the number of ballot papers to be printed will include internal and external electors).
If a large number of countries and a large number of electors are involved, negotiations can be started early to involve the diplomatic community, national EMBs and where relevant international agencies in those countries. It may be possible to borrow much of the polling station equipment locally and local election officials may assist in the preparations in each country, but an agreement will need to be reached with the local or national EMB. This assistance will vary greatly from country to country and will need to be negotiated separately. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, international support was crucial. ‘Most of the countries hosting Bosnian refugees were sufficiently affluent and politically stable to permit, and even fund, election activities on their soil. The same cannot be expected of host countries in other regions’ (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Refugee Election Steering Group 1997: 61). Where the number of external electors is small (e.g. diplomats, workers and travellers), the embassy of the country concerned can usually handle the arrangements without input by the local EMBs.
The Iraq external voting programme was the most expensive in history. Much of the costs in both Iraq and Afghanistan—particularly in Iraq—can be attributed to security requirements, although another factor in the case of Iraq was directly related to the institutional arrangements that were put in place to organize and conduct the external voting programme within a very short period of time: the entire external voting programme was contracted out to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), resulting in an organizational overhead being charged for the whole programme. The cost of external voting for Iraq in the December 2005 election, organised mainly by the IECI and Iraqi servants, was considerably lower than in the January election, organised with the assistance of international partners. East Timor’s external voting programme for its 1999 referendum on independence cost a fraction of what the programmes in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost. It registered about 6,220 electors in six countries and external voter turnout was 96.5 per cent.
Breaking external voting programmes down into parts, with the EMB of the home country itself contracting out directly for smaller pieces, such as the printing of ballot papers, can significantly reduce overall costs. Costs will be higher when external voting programmes have to establish an electoral register for the first time or to reconstruct a significantly flawed one. Other methods of reducing costs include eliminating the production of new identity documents.
Most costs are borne by a combination of the country of origin, the international community, and in a more limited way the host countries, but other costs can be borne by the voters themselves. Voters often pay their own travel fees associated with registration and voting. Depending on the election timetable, voters may need to make two trips, one to register and a second to cast their vote. These travel costs can be a significant obstacle to participation, particularly where eligible electors have to travel over large distances, and can result in low external voter turnout. For the January 2005 Iraqi elections, the costs for electors to travel to register and then again to vote were prohibitively high, particularly in countries such as Sweden and the United States (where an estimated 10 per cent of external votes were cast) where there were only a limited number of polling and registration sites. The Danish Government subsidized the travel of voters to participate in the Iraqi external voting programme, but most host countries did not provide such support.
Budget issues can produce creative and innovative solutions to some of the problems of external voting. In areas where large numbers of refugees live in close proximity, volunteers from refugee groups and other community or civic groups who have the necessary language skills could handle much of the education and training activities. In some cases it may be possible to draw on these groups to provide election officials. The expatriate community often suggests other cost-saving measures (although there could be a risk of these suggestions being biased).
Naturally, any financial costs should be considered alongside the non-financial costs of not conducting external voting, such as the implications for the consolidation of democracy, peace and stability, or national reconciliation, particularly in post-conflict societies. In some cases, the costs of not conducting out-of-country voting can in the long run far exceed the costs of any single external voting programme.
