Elections Technology in Recent Decades

In recent decades, electoral administrators have adopted several types of technology into the electoral process. While these technologies can bring great benefits in accuracy, speed, efficiency and effectiveness to the process, they also pose challenges in the fields of security, costs, sustainability, transparency and vendor dependence.

In a fully electronic electoral management system, the entire electoral process — voter, party and candidate registration; verification of candidate support signatures; ballot production; electoral logistics; voter identification; voting in polling stations or remotely; vote counting; results transmission; and presentation of preliminary and final results of data — can all be performed by electronic and digital equipment and with very limited human intervention. Currently, only a few countries, such as Norway, have achieved this level of automation of election administration. EMBs usually combine manual processes and electronic technology into a suitable hybrid system, which is influenced by a wide range of factors, and may arguably be considered unique in any given country.