The complexity and specialist skills necessary for electoral management require that an institution or institutions be responsible for electoral activities. Such bodies have a variety of shapes and sizes, with a wide range of titles to match, such as Election Commission, Department of Elections, Electoral Council, Election Unit or Electoral Board. The term electoral management body (EMB) has been coined to refer to the body or bodies responsible for electoral management, regardless of the wider institutional framework in place.
An EMB is an organization or body that has the sole purpose of, and is legally responsible for, managing some or all of the elements that are essential for the conduct of elections and direct democracy instruments—such as referendums, citizens’ initiatives and recall votes—if those are part of the legal framework. These essential (or core) elements include:
- determining who is eligible to vote;
- receiving and validating the nominations of electoral participants (for elections, political parties and/or candidates);
- conducting polling;
- counting the votes; and
- tabulating the votes.
If these essential elements are allocated to various bodies, then all bodies that share these responsibilities can be considered EMBs. An EMB may be a stand- alone institution, or a distinct management unit within a larger institution that may also have non-electoral tasks.
In addition to these essential elements, an EMB may undertake other tasks that assist in the conduct of elections and direct democracy instruments, such as voter registration, boundary delimitation, voter education and information, media monitoring and electoral dispute resolution. However, a body that has no electoral responsibilities other than, for example, boundary delimitation (such as a boundary delimitation commission), electoral dispute resolution (such as an electoral court), election media monitoring (such as a media monitoring commission), or the conduct of voter education and information (such as a civic education commission) is not considered an EMB because it is not managing any of the essential elements identified above. Similarly, a national population or statistics bureau that produces electoral registers as part of the general process of population registration is not considered to be an EMB.
Different EMBs may be established for different electoral processes. In Mexico and Poland, the EMBs are responsible for both presidential and parliamentary elections; in Australia, the national EMB deals with national-level elections, while state-level elections are the responsibility of separate state-level EMBs. In the United Kingdom (UK), the arrangements for the conduct of elections and referendums are separate.
Some bodies that are not engaged in any of the essential elements of elections may nonetheless be popularly regarded as EMBs. The US Federal Election Commission (FEC) defines its mission as ‘administering and enforcing federal campaign finance laws’. However, such institutions do not qualify as EMBs under the definition above.
In addition to the division of functional responsibility for different elements of the electoral process, electoral responsibilities may be divided between bodies at different levels. For example, some elements of the conduct of elections may be managed by a national-level electoral commission, a ministry (such as the Ministry of the Interior) or a national government agency, while others are implemented by local-level commissions, regional branches of government departments or local authorities (as in Spain). The term EMB may also apply to a national electoral commission that co-manages elections together with local authorities, such as the Swedish Election Authority, which coordinates ballot paper printing, the distribution of seats and the announcement of results at the national level.
