Procurement procedures for equipment, services and supplies are generally prescribed by government guidelines and practices, often complemented by EMB regulations and practices. The guidelines have become increasingly standardized around the world since the 1960s in response to regulations and pressure from international assistance and finance agencies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and UNDP.
An interesting case of adapting general governmental prescriptions to the specificity of election expenses is that of Spain. The state administration’s general procedures for expense management are applied with some modifications: a given expenditure requires financial clearance by the general expense-controlling agency within the executive branch of government. This is to ensure that expenses are handled according to budgetary and public contractual provisions. Until the mid-1980s, electoral expenses followed standard clearance procedures, which made management burdensome and dysfunctional due to the short timeline typical of the electoral process. (Making funds available for an after-expense justification was the procedure actually followed to make elections possible). Further legal reform introduced the modality of permanent financial control; in this system, prior clearance for every expense is not necessary, yet the controlling authority retains the right to examine electoral expenses at any given time in the process. Moreover, the Ministry of Interior must submit a detailed report on expenses to Parliament after the election. As for expense management by the different agencies involved in the process, each agency may spend the anticipated allowance in the budget from its own funds, with the understanding that it will be reimbursed by the Ministry of Interior. Such expenditures might cover voter registration expenses other than the current maintenance of the voter list to external voting—and certainly polling operations at lower levels, which are managed by local authorities.
The situation in Cambodia, an entirely different political-administrative environment, illustrates the difficulties in obtaining disbursements of the budget. In practice, the difficulties concerning electoral funding stem from the Ministry of Finance’s procedural and administrative practices, which are not geared for quick response in the context of election preparations. The standard finance procedures applicable to an ordinary government department are not capable of responding to the National Election Committee’s exceptional time constraints in terms of procuring election-related materials and ensuring unavoidable cash-flow disbursements during the organization of elections. In addition, direct funding from international donors or through UNDP tends to be disbursed quite late in the process, sometimes even after the election, thus creating additional cash-flow problems. In some cases, excessive earmarking may hamper the timely utilization of funds and may require last-minute changes to funding agreements to fit the actual operational expenditures more flexibly.
