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Voter Registration trends and practices around the worldVoter Registration trends and practices around the worldFacilitator - Sara Staino , November 15. 2006Original question:I am preparing a research on the theme "International and National Voters' Roll and Registration: common trends and practices around the world". I have the following questions:
Grateful to receive possible ideas on how to best to tackle any the questions above. Responses were received, with thanks, from:
Summary:The discussion below highlights that voter registration is one of the most important tasks of election administration. For citizens to exercise their democratic right to vote there must be a comprehensive and inclusive electoral register (also called voters register, list or roll). By confirming that voters have met all eligibility requirements, the voters list helps confer legitimacy on the electoral process. Voting registration methods: An efficient administrative measure to register voters is to combine the preparation of a voters roll with the civil registration and/or the issuance of a national ID card. Linking civil registration with voter registration is costly, but on the other hand duplication of workload for the electoral commission and institutions dealing with civil registry can be avoided and the registry can be used for a number of other purposes. A civil registration based voters register may be a good method to apply in high trust societies but do not necessarily translate well elsewhere. To have a voters register based on a civil register in cases where the electoral management body (EMB) is not responsible for the issuance of civil registration may create perceptions of misuse of data. Therefore, where the voter register is dependent on a department of government this method is not necessarily a good solution as it may undermine the independence of the electoral commission. However, the key consideration is not necessarily who undertakes the operation but the utilisation of the civil register after its compilation and the mere fact that it exists. Continuous registration can be appropriate in electoral structures where elections are held on a more regular basis than just once every four or five years. If elections for all elected offices are held on the same day it may be more sustainable to periodically update the voters register every few years. There is no right answer: a method that has worked well for some countries may not be appropriate in other contexts. A general consideration is however that the method chosen should be sustainable for the long term. Voter registration trends:
In some countries political parties are given the opportunity to review the voter’s roll and/or receive a copy of the voter’s roll. Civil society may, among other things, assist with voter’s education. Future trends in voter registration: Future trends may be defined by three significant changes that are taking place:
Possible future trends identified in the discussion below were:
Links to the ACE Encyclopaedia and other related resources:
Quote from the ACE Encyclopaedia on voter registration:"The success of registration efforts depends largely on whether the necessary administrative infrastructure is in place. This includes capacity for overall administrative and logistical planning or data collection; procurement policies and procedures; physical infrastructure; worker selection and training procedures; and the staffing necessary for all these aspects of the process. Establishing and maintaining the administrative infrastructure is costly and time-consuming. Without it, however, the electoral process may lack legitimacy and integrity."
Individual responses in full:Are there regional trends emerging around the world: Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America?
Horacio Boneo: You can almost write a book on this, so diverse are the experiences. I would only mention that here in Latin America there are a number of interesting cases (Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, among others) that combine the preparation of a voters' roll with the issuance of a national ID card and Civil registration (both issued by the electoral management body). I would not qualify it as a trend, as some of these institutions are rather old, but it might well be, in my opinion, the most efficient configuration. One frequent problem of electoral organizations is the seasonality of their work - in some cases they work intensely during six months, and then they have nothing to do for four years. In most of these cases, the remaining recognizable activity in non-election years is registering voters.
In Guatemala, for instance, the Commission has an office in each municipality for the purpose of registering voters. In over 70% of them, the work load was the registration of one voter or less per week. One possible solution, that I suggested at the time, was to subcontract with municipalities the collection of the primary information and the delivery of the voters' card once validated against the Commission's data bank. Therefore, combining this seasonal activity with others that have a permanent demand, like IDs or civil registers, results in an efficient configuration. Michael Meadowcroft: Leaving aside the civil liberties objections to ID cards in principle - which have certainly facilitated the identification of ethnicity in pogroms and genocide - there are powerful reasons why the electoral register should not be combined with a national ID card and Civil Registration. To do so undermines the independence of the electoral commission and gives a malign state the means of removing "undesirables" from the electoral register. If the two processes are conducted separately by the state and by the electoral commission it greatly inhibits the state from quietly making dissidents "non-citizens". Your pertinent comments above underline a key point in the passion for a permanent register and permanent registration. It is a noble aim but to accomplish what is, in effect, a continuous updating of the register - adding and subtracting names as appropriate - requires an electoral commission presence - even via sub-contracting - in every registration district, even though there is not enough throughput to justify it. The key consideration is not who undertakes the operation but who controls the utilisation of the civil register after its compilation. Alan Wall: I'd agree with the point on the potential for misuse of data in some countries/political cultures if voter registers are dependent on a civil register. I'd further add that I don't believe that the overall evidence shows that civil registration based voter registration is per se a more sustainable (in the broad, not just the resource affordability/availability sense) or effective methodology. But I don't think that it is appropriate to make a dogmatic argument that voters’ registers should not be based on civil registers any more than it is to make the argument that they should be. It's horses for courses, as so often in the electoral business. Isolating them from their environments, one can find voter registration case studies to conveniently support almost any generalist argument:
Civil registration based voters’ registers can be fine in societies with more open traditions, a population relatively trusting of how the data will be used, a relatively effective bureaucracy, and a general societal attitude of dutiful provision of information government wants - as in much of western Europe and adjoining states, and parts of the southern Americas.
Linking the right of voting to a duty to provide data for civil registration for a multitude of uses, known and unknown to citizens, may not be politically or ethically acceptable. As well as raising the potential issues of aiding repression/reducing perceptions of EMB independence of action, it also does not necessarily produce great accuracy or comprehensiveness of the voters register (see Ukraine, Indonesia pre-2003, Georgia etc). Most constructs of civil registration have the potential seeds of inaccuracies for voter registration purposes within their conception. Civil registration is basically concerned with people and only secondarily (if at all) with accurately identifying the current address at which they are domiciled for voting purposes. It may or may not be a priority for both persons and the civil registration authority to ensure that persons' addresses are kept wholly up to date or their electoral domicile clearly identified. Registration of voters, on the other hand, particularly in countries subdivided into electoral districts, or where direct elections at sub national level are held, or where voters are assigned to a specific voting station, is as much concerned with maintaining the correct electoral domicile of persons as their identity. The sustainability arguments that have been made in relation to civil register based voters registers seem often to be more resource efficiency/availability arguments than sustainability arguments - sustainability notions now are taken to include political sustainability, administrative sustainability, environmental sustainability etc, as well as the more traditional concerns of continued affordability and resource availability. To have a voters register based on a civil register run by a department of a government that is not widely trusted, or within a government department bureaucracy incapable of or unfunded to maintain a much more complex dataset than a voter register dataset, is no more useful than to have a stand alone register imposed using high cost or locally unsustainable technology. Even in the cost arguments it is often forgotten that civil registers, whilst having multiple uses, also have high start up and continuing maintenance costs - if they can be fully identified from whence they are often buried. See Ukraine, where in addition to political interference, a civil registration system that had not been resourced appropriately to enable maintenance of its data, run by a slothful department with a police rather than civil administration mindset, created an electoral mess just as great as the most unsustainable stand alone voter registration system. There is no right answer: what has worked well for voter registration in Sweden, or Germany, or Canada, or Australia, or Poland, or United Kingdom may not be appropriate in another environment. Civil registration based voter registers may be an appropriate solution; or they may not be. On the continuous vs. periodic registration issue, workload - as noted in earlier contributions - and also frequency of use of the voters register need to be considered. Continuous registration (and in some places, 'continuous' only means update by an ad hoc body once every few months) can be more appropriate, regardless of the continuous workload, in state/electoral structures where in-term vacancies are filled by direct by-elections, or there are rolling election dates for different geographic units or levels of government, or for executive and legislative elections. If elections for all elected offices are held on the same day after a fixed, regular term of office, a judgment may need to be made whether continuously maintaining a low level update capacity is more sustainable (resource wise and politically) than the intense effort required for a periodic voters register update at 3? 4? 5? yearly intervals. Maria Helena Alves: I am not sure we can talk about election related trends, since country solutions are too diverse. Anyway, if you insist on trends, I believe that regarding voter's registration and voter's roll we may be able to say that there are three major related trends:
And in fact, all these have been done in South Africa as far as I know. Staffan Darnolf: I would second Alves' view when it comes to the lack of trend(s). I wish I could say that we are all learning from each other and making great progress when it comes to improving upon the voter registers that we are working on around the world, but my sense is rather that it is very often up to a small set of individuals at the Election Commission, Ministry of Interior and a few donors who actually drives the process and decisions. The big issue for me is often sustainability as both national and international actors are so focused on the first/second generation of election that we have no energy, money or visions left for the update of the VR. Thereby, we are forced to start all over again four years down the road. And I am not pointing fingers here; I am guilty as charged too. Jerome Leyraud: I concur with Horacio’s opinion. From a registration point of view, the trend over the past years seems to be moving from one-off exercises to permanent enrolment, as performed by Tanzania last year. This should provide electoral management bodies (EMBs) with timely available updated voter rolls instead of resorting to expensive and time-consuming general registration exercises. However the permanent voter roll doesn’t preclude usual shortcomings in achieving a complete and accurate data collection of all national eligible voters. The Gambia, which carries both general and supplementary voter registration- one of the main challenges is for deleting the deaths from the voter roll between two general voter registration exercises. The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) is by law required to embark on a parallel exercise to delete the names of those who have deceased, hence dealing with Civil Registry administration while also registering new voters (or those who have moved from one constituency to another). It is a cumbersome exercise made almost manually, going through each municipality to retrieve data. Therefore linking civil registration with voter registration –although contested by some electoral practitioners- is an appealing way to get around the problem. It should indeed be further experienced in developing countries to achieve sustainable and cost-effective voter registration. New technologies may help develop a common matrix which encompasses both EMB and Civil Registry requirements and help the two administrations interact at local and/or central level to produce accurate figures. As far as I remember the voter roll in Madagascar (2002) was manually updated by municipality civil registrars who indeed knew quite well their constituency electorate. Incidentally in countries where citizenship remains a contentious issue, an intermingled and well-performing voter/civil registry may prevent questioning voters nationality. Latin America may be good laboratory to assess what the performance of such combined exercises is, although these countries may have a long tradition of established administrations (at central and local levels), which may not be the case in other parts of the world, and in particular in war-torn countries. In post conflict environment EMBs are usually faced with the challenge of building from scratch a voter roll, without building upon other structures and/or data (Civil Registry, Bureau of Statistics, Census….) in a very limited timeframe. As a result most of voter registration exercises in post-conflict countries are short-minded, focusing exclusively on immediate outputs and not addressing long term sustainability of data collection. Adequacy between systems put in place and institutional local capacities remain open to discussion (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, etc.). Maria Helena Alves: You might be interested to note that, last September, on the issue of Voter IDs for US voters recommended on the report issued by the Commission on US Federal Electoral Reform, former President Jimmy Carter (the president of the commission), said: "This Will Be, I Think, A Move Forward In Getting More People To Vote. It Would Not Restrict People From Voting. It Will Be Uniformly Applied Throughout The Country. And It Will Be Nondiscriminatory." Also, it might interest you to read a press release from the Brennan Center regarding the role played in the US by civic and religious organizations as well as voting rights groups in voter registration. Several US states are trying to approve laws that restrict the role these organizations have played so far in facilitating voter's registration. Sakuntala Kadirgamar-Rajasingham: In India, voter registration is an agency function of revenue departments of local bodies such as panchayats and municipalities.
However, many civic organisations (eg. Loksatta) have recommended voter-friendly answers to the problem of voter registration. They argue that if the local post office is made a nodal agency for registration, access and fairness will dramatically improve. There are about 250,000 post offices all over India; the postal system is widely acclaimed for its efficiency, access, user-friendliness and honesty. A post office is one of the few public institutions approached by ordinary citizens without fear or anxiety! If voter rolls are available locally, and the post office is made the nodal agency for voter registration and correction of defects, there will be a dramatic improvement. This convergence of services has become common practice in many places. In Kerala, the postal network helped in voter verification with great success. In the US, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hong Kong, the post office is effectively used for voter registration. In Germany, the citizen has to apply for a passport only at the local municipal office. Such convergence has become the norm in many countries. Years of advocacy in India has persuaded both the Election Commission and the postal department to make the post office the nodal agency for voter registration. It may take time before the process is fully underway. Read more about India: Challenges to effective voter registration in India and Legal requirements to register as a voter in India Michael Meadowcroft: The method chosen should be sustainable for the foreseeable future. In other words, the existence today of a stable, non-autocratic and non-threatening regime is increasingly no guarantee that it will continue to maintain those values. The post-9/11 changes in the levels of state control (and of paranoia) in otherwise hitherto "liberal" regimes demonstrate the problem. Thus I would always erge on the side of an independent and separate electoral registration. Alan Wall: My personal view is that everyone should have the right to remain anonymous if they so choose. Many democracies have functioned very well and for a long time without a civil register. On the other hand, democracies don't usually continue to exist without a credible and accurate voters register (well, let's disregard Latvia in the 1990s). I agree that the method used for voter registration has to be sustainable - in the broadest sense. I agree that a civil register based voters register (or civil registration at all) is not appropriate in an immediate post conflict environment/recently emerging democracy, or anywhere if not managed/oversighted by an independent authority. Though again, to me it depends on circumstances and what safeguards can be built into the system, and particularly on what the population wants, given their experience in the specific environment. An example very close to me at present, illustrating to me that there is no easy ‘one size fits all standard’, is in Aceh. Post conflict environment, totally untrusting of central government authorities but with a liberation movement (GAM) and population desperate to be issued a national ID card (from the Ministry of Interior that has run the police that have terrorised them for the last XX years). To not have a national ID card marks a person as Acehnese. In this case, ethnic discrimination is aided by not having a national ID card more than by what is on the national ID card. On the other hand I'm also working currently in Ukraine, where any short term attempt to institute a national ID card system (OSCE leading this inappropriate charge) is likely to founder on some orthodox religious communities' objections that a unique identifier number is the work of the devil. But, I'm not convinced that adding voter register extraction to a competently/accurately/ethically managed civil register automatically adds any more in the way of risk to persons - it depends on how it's done and who manages it and under what rules. The basic risks are in the (often prior) existence of the civil register itself. There is always a substantial potential level of risk in holding any databases of personal data. This is as true for a voters’ register held by an independent EMB - which may not turn out in the future to be quite as independent or uncorrupt as it was hoped - as for a civil register. Though I'd agree that misuse of a stand alone voters register generally does not have as much potential to do damage to persons as misuse of civil register data, as the voters’ register would not usually hold data on factors such as ethnicity, health, etc. However, in an increasing number of countries, stand alone voter registers hold personal data on issues such as past convictions, mental health, disabilities etc, that can be seriously compromising to people if misused. What is the role of other stakeholders in the conduct of voter registration: government ministries, parties, civil society?
Maria Helena Alves: As for the role of other stakeholders in the conduct of voter registration: government ministries, parties, civil society, I think that it is also diverse.
As for the parties, they often are given the opportunity to review the voter’s roll and/or receive a copy of the voter’s roll. As for the civil society, besides assisting with providing a local for voter's registration if necessary and voter’s education, I am not sure which other role they play. What are likely to emerge as future trends in voter registration in 10 years?
Horacio Boneo: I think that the trends will be defined by three significant changes that are taking place:
So I think we will be moving to systems that can "follow" the voter and facilitate registration. What shape they will have is not so clear, but in most cases they will involve significant interaction with other government agencies (e.g. municipalities), or with other agencies - I think that is the case in Canada. Michael Meadowcroft: There is a real paradox in relation to registration. If, as in Cambodia in 1998, there is rolling registration with each team spending, say, two days in each commune, before moving on to the next (with an advance party preparing the ground a few days ahead) the level of registration is likely to be higher than if teams spend weeks in each commune. Having to turn up to register during just a few days concentrates the mind - and the process is considerably cheaper. In the Democratic Republic of Congo the electoral commission decided, against much advice, to exclude the military and police from registering and voting. It was particularly ill-advised in an electoral process in which unification of all private militias into the national army was desperately important (see, for instance, the violence in Kinshasa after the first round polling day). If anyone is interested, my paper to the electoral commission is available in English and French on the website: www.bramley.demon.co.uk. Click on "Current affairs" in the list on the left; scroll down to "Electoral Affairs" and the two papers are the seventh and eighth items. (Or you can download the english language version directly here). Maria Helena Alves: Difficult to say what are likely to emerge as future trends in additon to what I have already said in my answer to question 1, which is: the use of an IT tool to record the voter's information; the development of a permanent voter's roll stored into a computerized data base system and; the issuance of a voter's ID card. But an important aspect to discuss is the maintenance of a permanent voter’s roll once it is established: where, how, how often, and voter's roll cut off date for elections. Staffan Darnolf: Looking at trends: Well, I certainly hope that we will improve upon the sustainability factor, as well as start merging the voter registry with civil registries because we are, in general, spending a ridiculous amount of money on stand-alone voter registration exercises. Alan Wall: Not necessarily as trends, but in addition to the issues of voter mobility, voter motivation, and technology/data matching/data sources, a few other issues may be worth critically discussing:
What are the strengths and weaknesses in current South Africa's experience of voter registration?
Maria Helena Alves: What are the strengths and weaknesses in current South Africa’s experience of voter registration? I guess this is for the South Africa to tell us… I would love to know myself since it is my understanding that South Africa already experiment several solutions.
THANKS TO ALL WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED! The opinions expressed by members of the ACE Practitioners' Network do not necessarily reflect those of the ACE Partner organizations. ACE PRACTITIONERS' NETWORK
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However, if the only reason for interacting with the electoral body is just registering for future elections (rather than also getting a Motor vehicle driving license as in the US or an ID document, as in the cases above) the turnout is very low. 
However, this doesn't necessarily translate well elsewhere, not just in those countries whose traditions (pre 9/11 hysteria at least) have found civil registration per se an assault on civil liberties, but especially in societies where past regimes have used information to attack their citizens, or where a culture has built up of hiding whatever information possible from authorities (parts of the former soviet union come to mind), or where people are just plain lazy about updating their civil registration data, or where bureaucratic systems are too inert to effectively maintain a monster single repository of personal data. 
The Revenue Officers of these bodies are the Electoral Registration Officers, and they represent the Election Commission. It is the responsibility of the eligible voters to enroll their names. Normally, voter registrations are allowed one week prior to the last date for nomination of candidates. Apart from this, ECI conducts periodical door-to-door voter registration/verification drives and publishes the electoral rolls online and offline, and electoral rolls are made public at Head Post Offices of a town/city.
Depending on the country, besides the electoral commission, you can have a ministry department, the post office, a local government institution involved in the voter registration. 