Voter registration is the most complex and controversial, and often least successful, part of electoral administration. By its nature, it involves collecting in a standardized format specific information from a vast number of voters, and then arranging and distributing these data in a form that can be used at election time—moreover, in such a way as to ensure that only eligible electors engage in the voting process and to guard against multiple voting, personation, and the like. The political sensitivity of these matters and the laborious nature of the task itself mean that voter registration is often one of the most expensive, time-consuming, and controversial parts of the entire electoral process.
Voter registration requirements are influenced by the design of the electoral system. A system which uses single-member districts usually requires that each voter be registered within the boundaries of a specified district. This means that FPTP, AV, TRS, and BC (when using single-member districts) are the most expensive and administratively time-consuming systems in terms of voter registration, alongside Parallel and MMP systems which contain single-member districts. The fewer, multimember districts of the BV, PBV, SNTV, and STV systems make the process a little easier, while large-district List PR systems are the least complicated.
Arrangements for registration for out-of-country voting may be particularly difficult. The simplicity of List PR in this context has been a contributing factor in its adoption in some major transitional elections, such as South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. It should be emphasized, however, that variations in electoral systems have only a minor impact on the often extremely high cost of voter registration.
Reproduced by permission of International IDEA from Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook © 2005 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance The electronic version of this publication is made available under a Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the publication, and to remix and adapt it, provided it is only for non-commercial purposes, that you appropriately attribute the publication and that you distribute it under an identical license. For more information on this licence see: