There are three general types of voter registration systems:
- periodic list
- continuous register or list
- civil registry
Each system has strengths and weaknesses. There is not a best system for all countries and circumstances. It is important that a country chooses the system that is most suitable for its own set of circumstances.
The periodic list is the simplest in many ways. A new list of eligible voters is generated for each electoral process. There is no need to maintain this list as current, accurate or complete beyond the current election. Consequently, the periodic list requires minimal ongoing administrative support between elections. Creating the list involves a major effort by the election management authority in the period leading up to an election, often using temporary personnel. This system is used in Ghana, Malawi and Liberia.
The continuous register or list builds on previous registration efforts, with the aim of maintaining a list updated regularly. This involves significant ongoing administrative effort. The result is that the election management authority will need a larger staff throughout the electoral cycle (that is, the full period from one election to the next). Updating necessitates tracking population changes, per example citizens who have reached voting age; deaths; people who have lost the right to vote because they were convicted of a criminal offence; or changes of address. Many jurisdictions have no formal or legal requirement for citizens to report a change in status to the election management authority within a specified time. To obtain the information it needs for updating entries in a continuous list, the authority typically seeks data-sharing agreements with other government ministries or public agencies, such as the driver’s licence bureaus (motor vehicle registers), tax departments and the post office as it is common practice in Argentina, Australia, Canada and France. Updates through data sharing are facilitated if each citizen is assigned and uses a citizen identification number; without that, it can be difficult to match files. Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Tanzania and Mozambique have all adopted the system.
Even greater administrative effort is required for a civil registry. This is a population register that includes the name and other identifying characteristics of citizens, such as the citizen identification number, date of birth, address and gender. It is used for various public purposes. One of these is to generate a voters’ list for elections. The civil registry is maintained by authorities other than election management authorities – perhaps the taxation department. Citizens must keep their information up to date in the registry in order to continue receiving various social benefits, including education, health care and employment benefits. The election management authority plays little or no role in updating the voters’ list, simply receiving this database from the body in charge of the civil registry. This gives the election management authorities much less responsibility and control over the quality of the list than it would have if it was maintained in a continuous register.
