Technology can be used by election management bodies (EMBs) to register political parties for participation in elections. In particular, computer software can be used in the process of determining whether a party has the right to be registered and for creating and maintaining a political party’s register.
Party member verification
In many countries, a political party has to meet a minimum membership requirement in order to be officially registered as a party and to participate in elections. An EMB can verify that a party has met this requirement by using software programmed to analyse the party's claims of membership status.
The use of computer software requires party membership data to be captured electronically. In many cases, parties already have digital membership lists, and they are able to provide them to an EMB using an electronic storage media, such as tapes, floppy disks, CD-Rom and DVDs or by email.
Where parties do not have digital copies of their lists, they can usually supply hardcopy lists. These need to be converted into electronic form either by manually entering the data into a database or spreadsheet software, or by scanning the lists using an optical scanner equipped with intelligent character recognition software. If there is a need to digitise signatures or photographs of party members, image scanning can also be used.
Once party membership lists are available electronically, database, spreadsheet or custom made software can be used to process them and produce lists according to various criteria. The software can then be used, for instance, to verify that members are not listed twice or that one person does not appear as a member of several parties twice. By using mail merge software, it is also possible to generate letters , to persons on the membership lists to request confirmation of their party membership. Bar codes can be used on the replies to speed the data entry of responses.
If only a sample of persons on a party membership list is to be contacted in the above manner, software can be used to extract the needed random samples.
Where the EMB has access to a voter’s register with digitalised voter signatures, photographs or/and finger prints, signature or bio data recognition technology may be used to verify that the identities submitted as party members are genuine.
Party information databases
Once a party has been registered, the EMB usually requires its details to be kept on file. Database management software is recommended for maintaining this information, although a simple register can be kept on a word processor or spreadsheet system.
Where party register details have to be made publicly available, this can be achieved by providing them in hardcopy and electronic format. Details could be published on the Internet to allow easy access for those with Internet capability. For a large, complex or regularly changing party register, the Internet copy of the register could be linked to the party register database to allow for automatic updating of the Internet version.
