Sound design, procurement and management policies for electoral materials are based on rigorous needs analysis and thus contribute to the sustainability of an EMB’s operations. Before procuring materials, EMBs need to determine the most suitable options after investigating issues including:
- need: what benefit the desired materials add to electoral processes;
- local or international sourcing: issues such as cost, control, production lead time, quality, certainty of delivery, maintenance and substitutability;
- quality: issues such as cost, the conditions under which the materials will be used, ability to support integrity standards and requirements for durability;
- single or multiple use: issues such as storage and production costs, and environmental impact, including disposal and recycling methods, and opportunities for use by other organizations;
- complexity: issues such as the knowledge levels of the users, training requirements and capacity to maintain the materials;
- quantity: issues such as unit costs, production lead time, storage requirements and needs for reserves;
- distribution: issues such as costs and distribution time/scheduling;
- storage and archiving requirements: issues such as cost, accessibility, centralized or decentralized warehousing, asset protection measures and deterioration rate; and
- disposal: issues such as environmental impact, end of life value and security requirements.
EMBs have community responsibilities to consider — not just the economic sustainability of materials purchases, but the environmental and social impacts as well. Life cycle analysis, which considers the ‘cradle to grave’ economic, environmental and social costs and impacts of products, can help an EMB choose suitable electoral materials. This analysis assesses all material use impacts, not only those related to materials production, but also those such as opportunities for reuse, the impacts of storage and distribution over the materials’ whole life, and the costs of environmentally sound disposal or opportunities for recycling.
Rigorous determination of whether special types of materials are really needed, and maintaining tight control of the quantities produced, can assist financial sustainability. Tight audit controls on the printing of ballot papers, and other forms for which accounts need to be kept, will also help reduce costs.
Existing low-cost materials options may not be fully utilized in new and emerging democracies due to a lack of public confidence in an EMB’s ability to ensure security and prevent fraud if they were used. For example, EMBs may have to print ballot papers abroad because opposition political parties object to the government printer or local private printers doing this work. On the other hand, Indonesian law requires local printing of ballot papers; the EMBs of Australia, Canada and South Africa use low-cost materials for ballot boxes and voting booths; and Nicaragua has used locally produced ballot boxes without adverse effects on ballot security. Use of such low-cost materials depends on the EMB implementing sound security management controls.
Many EMBs are reducing election costs by sharing resources such as ballot boxes and voting booths. For example, Ghana’s EMB lent ballot materials to other EMBs in its region during 2003 and 2004. The South African EMB has provided professional services and shared computer equipment with other EMBs on the African continent. In Bhutan, voting machines used by the EMB at the 2013 election were gifted from India. Resources can also be shared between the EMB and other government agencies, such as ministries and municipal authorities, in areas such as transport, logistics, statistical data and related professional services. In Bangladesh, information obtained by the EMB has been used to issue provisional national ID cards, the management of which will in the future be the responsibility of a national organization.
Experience in the 1990s in countries such as Cambodia and Indonesia has shown that post-election retention of electoral materials and equipment (such as motor vehicles, mobile phones, computers and ballot boxes) may be neglected, resulting in misappropriation or damage. Considerable losses to EMBs are incurred in this way, and the EMB may lose credibility with funders. Effective continuous asset management procedures (see Chapter 7) can prevent this. The use of dedicated storage space, especially for valuable but infrequently used electronic equipment, is also worthy of consideration.
