Voter registration is an important, and often very expensive, part of an election. Also, it is one of the areas of the electoral cycle where the influence and the application of ICTs are growing the most.
Voter registration establishes the eligibility of individuals to cast a ballot. As one of the more costly, time-consuming and complex aspects of the electoral process, it often accounts for a considerable portion of the budget, staff time and resources of an election authority. If conducted well, voter registration can confer legitimacy on the process. A flawed voter registry, on the other hand, complicates electoral planning and removes an important safeguard against fraud.
A voters list makes it possible to separate two of the most important functions of the election authority: verifying voter eligibility and controlling the legitimacy of the balloting process. The list may also be used in voter education, and may be provided to political parties and candidates to aid them in their campaigns. While elections may proceed without it, a voters list offers advantages that readily justify its use.
By confirming that voters have met all eligibility requirements, the voters list helps confer legitimacy on the electoral process. Conversely, the legitimacy of the process will immediately be called into question if there are problems with voter registration, and particularly with the integrity of the voters list. Voter registration therefore is one of the most important tasks of election administration and there are three options to implement it:
A periodic register of voters, or a “periodic list,” is established for a specific electoral event, and electoral administrators do not necessarily intend to maintain or update the list for future use (although it may be used for by-elections in the period of time after its compilation and before the next occasion a periodic list is compiled). Normally the list is drawn up immediately before the election, although this need not be the case. This system is relatively expensive and time-consuming since it requires direct contact with all eligible voters before the election. It may be particularly useful where the infrastructure is lacking to maintain a continuous list, where population mobility is high or where there is opposition to the maintenance of lists of citizens by the government. The periodic list may also be preferred by quasi-governmental agencies, such as electoral management bodies or commissions, particularly as a periodic list is often “owned” by the EMB as the agency that compiles it.
A continuous list of voters is a list that is maintained and regularly updated by the electoral administration. This system depends on an appropriate infrastructure to maintain the list. Maintenance typically involves adding the names and other relevant information of new people that satisfy the eligibility requirements (e.g. those reaching the voting age, naturalised citizens, etc.), deleting the names of those who no longer meet the requirements (e.g. through death), and altering the details of those voters whose recorded data in the voters list requires updating (e.g. through name change form marriage or change of residence). Since the continuous list is updated on a regular basis there is no need for a full or final registration drive immediately before an election (although a period is often designated for revising the list during the election campaign). A continuous list may be maintained either locally or nationally.
To facilitate list updates, many election authorities form data-sharing partnerships with other government bodies. For example, when citizens change their place of residence, they may inform the tax bureau, the post office, the housing authority or the health system. In many countries with a continuous register, partnerships allow the election authority to receive regular updates of changes to these bodies’ files. This makes it possible to update the electoral register without any direct contact between the voter and the election authority. In some cases, on learning about a change of address, the election authority may send the voter a new voter registration card with a request to update and confirm the information that appears on it.
A third option for registering voters is to generate the voter list from the civil registry. Civil registries are maintained, to various degrees, in many countries. Civil registries may contain a variety of information on all citizens, such as name, address, citizenship, age, marital status and identification number. In certain countries, particularly in Europe and Latin America, the voters list is produced from information contained in the national civil registry. In countries with a civil registry, a central question, as it pertains to elections, is whether the body responsible for maintaining the civil registry (often the interior ministry) should be responsible for the voters list. Some countries give the same institution responsibility for both registries; others choose two agencies, each with responsibility for one of the lists.
If a civil registry is in place, producing a voters list from it is relatively efficient and costeffective. This is because the major costs are borne in the first place by the civil registry authorities. And while it is relatively expensive to maintain a civil registry, the information recorded may be used for multiple purposes, reducing the government’s overall data management costs.
The major drawback of the system is its major strength. Even though the high cost may be justified, data sharing among government institutions may give rise to controversy. Concerns may be expressed about the loss, or potential loss, of privacy, particularly if the government decides to add additional data fields, or merge the registry with, for example, the tax authority’s database. If the concerns are widespread, a civil registry may be simply unacceptable despite its usefulness.
