The values that educators
espouse and their own experience and background will have an impact on where education
is made available, who receives the programme, and what the programme covers.
In resource-rich situations, this may not be a problem, but in countries with
limited resources, special care will have to be given to making sure that
certain voters are not ignored.
Voter educators employed by
the election authorities may not be able to shrug off particular groups of
learners because they do not like them or consider them to be irrelevant. But
even they are not immune from personal bias. Non-statutory educators, on the
other hand, make decisions all the time about which groups of people they
intend to work with and which they intend to ignore. In most cases these
decisions are made on the basis of a set of operating values that may be
explicit, and hence transparent and predictable. But this is not always the
case. Sometimes, NGOs and community organisations can be blind to their own
biases.
As a result of these values
and biases, it may happen that particular targets and constituencies get a
great deal of attention and others none at all. Where there is transparency on
the part of educators, official voter programmes can choose to "fill the
gaps." Or they may identify particular sets of voters on the basis of the
value system espoused by the electoral authorities, or simply undertake a
general voter education program and require that non-statutory groups either
"fill the gaps" or target groups with special needs. The crucial
issue here is to make the values and biases upon which decisions are made
visible, if only to the education planners themselves.
In addition to choices
about particular target groups, educator values can also determine in advance
certain choices about educational needs. Often, election authorities may be
chosen for their legal background or even seconded from the judicial branch.
They may have vast experience in the government bureaucracy and be familiar
with all pertinent laws, regulations, and procedures. At the same time, they
may be quite far removed from the administrative concerns of poll workers and
the information and awareness levels of ordinary voters. Ideally, there should
be a dialogue between the educator (who has something) and the learner (who
wants something) - especially when the learners are adults - in order to identify
educational needs. The decisions about what the educator will offer and how,
the educational needs deemed to be appropriate, and which of these will be
addressed are all value decisions.
Where there are a large
number of educational initiatives, and unlimited resources, it may not be
necessary to worry too much about these questions. Planning can make use of the
various interests being expressed by voter educators to ensure general
coverage. But this may not always be the case, particularly in developing countries
and transitional settings, so care will have to be taken to ensure that there
are not system breakdowns (i.e., unanticipated gaps that lead to failure of the
programme) because educators decided not to provide education in a particular
language, or to a certain target group, or to a particular village, or even a
particular radio station or newspaper.
Care also has to be taken
to make sure that choices do not devour resources in favour of one group at the
expense of another because they know how to vote or they never vote or even, in
the worst of all possible scenarios, because "they will vote for them
rather than us."
