Much of the operational infrastructure for registration can be identified by the central election management authority well in advance of an electoral event. The head of the local election management authority (e.g. the regional registration director) can then set up the infrastructure in the time immediately before the start of registration. The challenge is to quickly put in place office facilities that may be used for only a few weeks or months, along with a staff generally lacking experience in voter registration.
Operational Needs
Building an operational infrastructure normally involves:
- setting the budget for offices, staff and equipment
- determining office location while remaining within the budget allocation
- determining equipment needs
- specifying staff duties
- interviewing and training staff
- estimating the number of registrations to be completed
- dividing the geographic area covered into an appropriate number of registration subunits (polls)
Advantage of a Geographically Based Continuous List
A continuous list may organise, store and track data on the basis of geography (addresses) or individual voters. Residential addresses are one of the least changeable features of the electoral environment, and a list based on them has the advantage of stability: people increasingly change where they live but homes normally do not move. A continuous list organised on a geographic basis facilitates the development of a highly distributed, localised election infrastructure able to track information in each locality.
Linking Existing Data Sets
In a system with a continuous register or a civil registry, the election management authority often relies on data sharing with other public bodies to update information in the voters list. This presents significant challenges because each data set has been collected by a different organisation for a different purpose. The election management authority must find or develop a common element for linking and rationalising all these data sets. Among the tasks that may be involved are the following:
- Identifying the completeness of lists. All lists can be expected to be incomplete in certain respects. For example, taxation rolls exclude people who are not in the paid workforce and have no taxable income. Homemakers, students and retirees may all be affected. So too might be the chronically unemployed or anyone who is effectively unemployable because of disability. Other databases may fill in the gaps in the taxation data – for instance, records on eligibility for various social services, or files on marriage or driver’s licences issued. Also useful are immigration and naturalization records. Basic records on births and deaths are normally a key component of any civil registry.
- Assigning a unique identification number. Linking across databases requires a system of matching records for the same person in the different databases. By far the most efficient approach is to assign a unique identification number to a citizen, for use in each separate database. This can require all the databases to be adjusted and updated so that they include the common identification number for each individual in their records. The citizen identification number is the basis of the civil registry. The number may be assigned at birth, or on registration of the birth, and stays with the individual throughout his or her life. Such a registration system is likely to require a phase-in period allowing people born before introduction of the system to obtain an identification number and have their records adjusted. Countries that use a continuous register, however, usually do not assign citizen identification numbers. Election officials must therefore find another way of ensuring that an individual listed in one database is the same person listed in another database.
