Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) are vital for accrediting the election result with the stamp of approval that the elected regime needs to win national and international legitimacy. In order to successfully carry out its mandate, an EMB needs both qualified and experienced staff as well as accurate demographic statistics to feed into the national voters’ roll.
Where the HIV/AIDS epidemic reduces the availability of such appropriately qualified staff and where increased mortality is not accurately reflected in the voters’ roll, the risk of electoral fraud increases manifold (ibid.: 29).
In general EMBs which rely on public service workers for support during elections are vulnerable to the pandemic’s effects that might compromise its institutional capacities. This vulnerability is aggravated by the fact that most temporary staff are from the public service, particularly the teaching profession, which is one of the hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As the conduct of elections requires experienced staff, the vulnerability of support personnel to the disease is likely to reduce the EMB’s ability to rely on them to bring their accumulated experience and skills to bear on future elections.” (ibid.:14).
Mattes notes that besides decimating the number of public servants, the pandemic could severely harm the processes of political institutionalism. A shrinking body of civil servants will have been at their position long enough to develop the specialised skills, expertise, and professionalism needed to do their work.
Furthermore, there will be fewer experienced officials available to train younger personnel in key formal skills, or pass on more informal standard operation procedures or norms (Maanda David Nelufule, AIDS and democracy: what do we know, 2004:19).
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