Apart from the main contingent of staff required in voting stations on voting day and for the count, there will generally be a need to engage staff for other voting operations support duties. These would include:
• Where there is no permanent electoral management body presence at a local level, temporary electoral district managers, local election commissions, or similar staff (depending on how accountabilities are defined in the legal framework) responsible for the election in each electoral district.
Where the election is not electing individual representatives to multiple electoral districts, these could be geographic administration areas based on other administrative boundaries, such as local government districts.
• Staff for special voting facilities, such as early voting, mail voting, voting at foreign locations, absentee voting facilities, and mobile voting stations.
• Administrative support for election preparation tasks, such as organising supplies and logistics, recruitment and other staffing matters, packaging of material for despatch to voting stations, and return of material from the count.
• Where resources and geographic conditions allow, a network of roving field supervisors to assist voting station managers and monitor voting station performance on voting day.
Administrative Support
To maintain cost-effective service delivery, even permanent electoral management bodies would not usually be permanently staffed to the level required to deliver all required services during the election period.
Cost effective solutions to additional output needs during this period could involve engagement of temporary staff for;
• administrative support, or
• contracting out (with sufficiently rigorous performance guarantees) some large scale administrative functions, such as payroll management and packaging of voting station material, to other organizations
Strict controls on costs of additional administrative support staff should be implemented. As most tasks are likely to peak and trough in an irregular fashion, it would be more cost-effective to engage most temporary administrative assistance staff on an hourly basis rather than guaranteeing them work on a daily, weekly, or longer basis.
Temporary administrative assistance staff would be generally more usefully employed on intensive, larger scale process-driven tasks, such as:
• maintaining staffing and payroll records;
• preparing purchasing documentation for approval and monitoring supply of orders;
• checking materials and equipment supplies and repackaging this for delivery to voting stations;
• checking and sorting for secure storage, re-use, or destruction of materials returned from voting stations and counts;
• assisting with any mail voting functions conducted from electoral management body offices;
• general administrative and logistics assistance to electoral management body staff, including in electoral district managers' offices;
• answering less complex queries from voters.
Maintaining comprehensive historical data on processing times and workloads will help in developing frameworks for improving efficient use of temporary administrative staff.
Except for tasks requiring any specialist data entry or similar skills, it would generally be more effective to draw on the same database of staff for these needs rather than engaging staff for specific functions.
Roving Officials/Voting Station Liaison Officers
Voting operations administrators often need to be relatively office-bound on voting day, particularly if managing electoral district or regional operations and security centers
Management effectiveness can be greatly enhanced if senior voting station staffs (preferably with some prior experience as voting station managers) are appointed as roving liaison officers or inspectors for a group of voting stations. The ability to do this will be limited by the availability of suitable staff, the distance between voting stations, and the security environment. In rural areas, particularly, this may not be practicable to implement.
The number of roving officials that would be reasonable to assign will vary according to the geographic size of the electoral administration district and the number of voting stations. A sufficient number should be employed to allow a minimum of one visit during the hours of voting to each voting station in their areas, and preferably two, one in the first few hours of voting and another later in the day or around close of voting. Voting stations under the control of less experienced managers (during training) should be targeted for more frequent visits.
These roving officials should generally be able to provide effective field supervision for eight to ten voting locations. Such officials can serve as effective "eyes and ears" for the election administration and provide support for voting station managers in their tasks. Appropriate duties for such officials would include:
• sure that procedures for voting are being followed correctly in voting stations and provide guidance to voting station managers and staff on correct procedures;
• inspect checklists of activities completed by voting station managers and ensure that all required tasks have been completed;
• ensure that voting station layouts follow the correct plan, or if modified are an effective response to difficulties with the location being used;
• carry with them reserve stocks of voting materials to use for emergency re-supply of voting stations;
• assist voting station managers with any planning issues for the remainder of voting day;
• ensure that close of voting activities have been conducted correctly and provide any required guidance on the packaging of materials;
• monitor the correct application of count procedures where counts are to be conducted in voting stations;
• complete performance quality checklists for each voting station visited and provide progress reports to the electoral district manager on the overall situation in the field during voting day;
• following the conclusion of voting, provide a report to the electoral district manager on the performance of voting station managers and an assessment of the operations in each voting station.
To be effective, these roving officials will require:
• reliable transportation sufficient to hold a travelling reserve stock of materials;
• clear delegated authority from the voting operations administrators to direct voting station staff;
• radio or mobile phone communication from their vehicle to voting stations and to the relevant voting operations centre.
While the engagement of this additional staff may be considered a luxury, in jurisdictions where they are used they have had a marked positive effect on the quality of voting station performance.
