Voters, election administrators, politicians and commentators all tend to be comfortable with what is familiar. Years of use may have smoothed the rough edges of established systems. A new system can thus be a leap into the unknown, and problems in implementation can arise from its unfamiliarity. This cannot be avoided completely, and the planners of change cannot sit back when legislative changes are in place. A process of change is complete only with intensive voter education programmes to explain to all participants how the new system works and with the design and agreement of user-friendly implementing regulations.
The most effective voter education—and election administrator education—takes time and its therefore important to start early. Unfortunately, in reality time is often in short supply to an electoral management body (EMB) organizing an election under a new system, but it need not to be if good planning is applied. All good negotiators use time pressure before a final agreement is reached, and this is particularly true when the new system is the product of hard negotiation between political actors. Something similar happened a few weeks before the 2012 elections in El Salvador, when the electoral management body was not able to agree on the company to be hired to run the voter´s education campaign and had to sign agreements with social organizations in order to spread the new way of voting. An effective EMB will nonetheless prepare an election as much as possible as early as possible.
