Before communications costs can be accurately budgeted for the electoral management body needs to determine the extent of communications coverage in the country. These would include fixed line operators, mobile telephone coverage, Wide Area Network, satellite facilities and radio handsets.
Communications costs will need to include:
• cost of calls made over telecommunications networks;
• costs of any additional communication equipment, such as fixed phone lines, telephone handsets, mobile phones, personal radios and base stations;
• any additional mobile or radio network facilities required.
The type of equipment that is most suitable and cost-effective will depend on the environment. Best practice would require that each voting station should be provided with some method of voice communication with its election administration office.
Wherever available and reliable, fixed telephone lines generally will be less costly and therefore preferable.
Election administration offices will generally need to augment their voice communication capacities for the election period, to deal with both administration and voter inquiries.
For the voting period, there should be sufficient capacity for voice contact with all voting stations in the office's areas of responsibility, with no significant delay.
Postage
Postage costs may be incurred for general communications with voters, parties and candidates, particularly for the provision of information sheets, manuals and election documentation. Postage costs may be substantially increased if courier services are used.
Situations may require immediate postings that are adequately facilitated by courier services only. There may also be postage costs associated with the recruitment of voting station officers.
Additional postage costs may include:
• in systems where voting by mail is available, costs of dispatch of mail ballots (and their return where reply paid returns are used);
• where applications for mail ballots are mailed to voters, these costs may double;
• mail delivery of voter information guides.
It would generally be possible, if the electoral management body pre-sorts its outgoing mail by area, to obtain substantial discounts on mail costs from postal authorities. This will usually only be advantageous for large scale mailings, such as voter information guides, mail ballots and the like.
