Donor support may help improve the quality of an election, and in some cases may even be necessary for it to occur. However for many EMBs, donor support has implications for the sustainable delivery of free, fair and credible elections. For example, see the case studies on Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya and Nigeria.

While donor support may include budgetary contributions and technical assistance, including advanced technologies, some donors avoid supporting EMBs’ recurrent budgets — that is, core personnel costs and rental of buildings and furniture, as well as other non-technical items, such as motor vehicles and fuel.

Donor assistance is sometimes accompanied by a tied aid concept in which the recipient EMB is required to purchase goods and services from nationals of the donor concerned. The costs of purchasing from external vendors is often considerably higher than purchasing from suppliers in-country, which inflates overall electoral costs.

In some post-conflict situations, such as those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Liberia and Timor-Leste, donors have contributed almost the entire cost of the transitional elections. In such cases, subsequent elections are unable to achieve the same level of funding and will offer a lower level of election services, which may lead to dissatisfaction with the elections. This raises obvious issues of creating transitional structures that the local authorities can ‘buy into’ subsequently, and building the necessary expertise to generate the financial resources to conduct future elections. In other post-conflict situations outside support may be vital, but it may not be politically or economically desirable for outside authorities to assume ownership of organizing and conducting transitional elections: Afghanistan, Iraq  and Libya may fall into this category. Failed states and failed EMBs may also require considerable outside assistance from various donors; sometimes the UN plays a coordinating role, as in Liberia in 2004–05.

Donors have responsibilities to ensure that the electoral assistance they provide to EMBs is effective and promotes sustainability. Key issues for donors to consider in this regard include:

1. coordination of assistance with the EMB and other donors;
2. working with the host government, possibly through or in cooperation with a range of agencies, to ensure that electoral assistance is provided in a way that reflects the government’s development priorities;
3. planning the implementation of assistance to synchronize with the EMB’s needs;
4. the  appropriateness  of  any  proposed  systems/solutions  for  the  EMB’s environment;
5. the inclusion of capacity building for the EMB and its staff;
6. the  inclusion  of  EMB  staff  in  the  management  of  donor-funded programmes; and
7. the long-term costs of any systems/equipment provided.

The CORE Project notes that Cambodia reduced its donor dependence to less than 50 per cent during the 2003 elections. Timor-Leste has similarly succeeded since the restoration of its independence in 2002 in covering election costs from its annual state budget, rather than relying on substantial donor funding. Although it is desirable to transfer skills to local election officials during the transitional electoral period, in practice this goal has seldom been satisfactorily achieved at the senior management level, though well-trained cadres of polling staff are often generated. Therefore, capacity building is likely to be a continuing need in post-transitional elections. In post-conflict environments, initial external assistance is vital for restoring democracy and stability, but unless considerable donor assistance continues to be available in the medium term to develop EMB capabilities, both the electoral process and democracy itself may experience reverses.

New technologies can help improve the quality of electoral processes, especially where large amounts of data have to be processed quickly, as they do in the delimitation of electoral districts, voter registration, and the voting and vote-counting process. An increasing number of EMBs are entering the field of electronic voter registration, often incorporating biometric elements. Even some self-sustaining EMBs, for example in Costa Rica, have found it necessary to rely on outside assistance to fund the introduction of new technology. However, new technologies may have significant long-term cost implications for the EMB, for example maintenance costs or software licensing fees. Introducing donor-driven technological solutions may create political demands for progressively greater dependence on externally provided technology, as was experienced with voter registration in Haiti. Opinions are therefore divided on the question of the sustainability of funding voting computerization, Internet and telecommunication services, and other electoral technology such as scanners and biometrics for voter registration. Aspects to be considered by EMBs and donors include:

1. the financial, social and political costs/benefits of using donor assistance for funding new technology compared to using it for other electoral assistance programmes;
2. the life span of the technology (i.e. will the equipment require similarly expensive replacement at the next electoral event, or will it be useful in years and elections to come?);
3. capacities for local maintenance of the technology. If there is no technical or financial capacity to maintain the hardware  or  software  that  has been internationally provided, or if the appropriate skills have not been transferred to allow local operation once the international advisers have gone, internationally provided technology can be a very expensive single- use solution;
4. the potential to make the technology available for use by other government or societal organizations after the electoral event, or to lend it to other countries for their elections; and
5. training for temporary electoral staff using internationally provided technology that can be transferred to their post-electoral work environments.