Voter lists are meant for the exclusive purpose of recording the enfranchisement of voters and facilitating the voting operation by which the citizens eligible to vote (with given age and legal conditions) exercise their right to suffrage on a periodic basis. Voter lists are the tangible proof of enfranchisement, and the quality of such lists is to be judged according to their capacity to serve that specific purpose.
Other registries of people exist and are meant to achieve different purposes: civil registries, lists of residents, and different personal identification documents (i.e., identity cards, passports and driver licenses). The number of registries and the institutional locations of each registry vary from country to country, depending on historical and legal traditions.
Civil registries, which are usually based at local government levels, serve the purpose of recording and certifying births, deaths and marital status. Certification by civil registry is the main proof of citizenship, which in turn is generally based on nationality. Civil registries also offer proof of age—and both citizenship and age are the fundamental requirements for voter enfranchisement. Other lists are compiled Voter lists should not be considered per se as registries of citizens or of residents. Voter lists are intended neither to help with the identification of citizens, nor (even less so) to serve as a resource for the quantification of the population of a given country. Voter lists essentially exist for the purpose of allowing individual voters to vote only within a given constituency and at a given polling station.
In the production and maintenance of voter lists, the kind of links to be expected between voter lists and other types of registries basically depends upon two factors. One is the legal administrative tradition of a given country. The other refers to the special circumstances under which voter registration is organized, most frequently in the case of emerging democracies and post-conflict situations. In the latter case, problems stemming from a deficit of population statistics, civil registries and citizen identification, as well as significant displaced populations, may strongly influence the procedures whereby voters are registered. In general, the main link between voter lists and civil registries is the requirement of a birth certificate as proof of citizenship (which is normally defined by nationality) and, at least in the first instance, a proof of residency (which would normally be required for the allocation of individual voters to constituencies, polling centers, and polling stations). Voter lists and personal identification documents are linked by the necessity for the voter to be identified at the ballot box. Finally, the link of voter lists with population censuses can be found in the facilitating role of census data for the organization of early voter registration, and the disaggregating of voter lists into constituencies. Also, population statistics may be crosschecked with voter lists to assess the size or age of segments of the population that will be eligible for enfranchisement at the present time or in the future. Or provide citizens or residents in a country with certain personal documents, such as national identity cards, passports or driver licenses. These activities are frequently undertaken by some branch of the security administration, normally the national police, and these documents exist for the purpose of personal individual identification. A third type of registry is a list of residents, which may be compiled, maintained and updated by local authorities in the districts of large cities, townships, communes or villages. These lists may serve different purposes normally related to the delivery of public services at the local level, and to provide information to higher levels of government for their respective action (i.e., correcting or updating other lists of citizens on which residence information is required, like the voter lists). Finally, another kind of documentary record is the population census, which is usually compiled every 10 years for the production of aggregate statistics of the population at different territorial levels of a country. Aggregate census information (but not data on individual persons) has many different uses, including the definition of electoral constituencies, which may be based on population, and the allocation of parliamentary or local council seats to constituencies according to population.
Next: Voter registration systems in a global perspective
