Any single-member district system requires the time-consuming and potentially expensive process of drawing boundaries for relatively small constituencies. The way in which they are demarcated will depend on issues such as population size, cohesiveness, transportation and communication networks, ‘communities of interest’, and contiguity. Furthermore, this is rarely a one-off task, as boundaries have to be adjusted regularly to take population changes into account. FPTP, AV, and TRS systems produce the most administrative headaches on this score. The BV, PBV, SNTV, LV, and STV systems also require electoral districts to be demarcated but are somewhat easier to manage because they use multi-member districts, which will be fewer in number and larger. Drawing districts for the majoritarian element of a mixed system poses similar challenges.
When multi-member districts are used, it is possible to avoid the need to adjust boundaries by changing the number of representatives elected from each electoral district instead—a method of particular value when established units such as provinces are used as electoral districts. List PR systems are often the cheapest and easiest to administer because they use either one single national constituency, which means that no boundaries need be drawn at all, or very large multi-member districts which dovetail with pre-existing state or provincial boundaries. UN-sponsored elections in Sierra Leone in 1996, Liberia in 1997, and Kosovo in 2001 were all conducted under a national List PR system, partly because the displacement of people and the lack of accurate census data meant that electoral authorities did not have the population data necessary to draw smaller districts.
