'Accountability' seems at first sight to be more technical, and less interesting than some of the other guiding principles. Yet, it is vital. Each candidate and party must have reasonable assurance that its rivals have obeyed the rules. Ordinary voters and the press also need to be confident of this. Confidence in the integrity of the electoral process requires efficient and accountable administration.
If electoral fraud is to be avoided, the authorities responsible for drawing up the electoral roll, for organizing the ballot on polling day, and for counting and collating the votes, need to be able to explain and justify their procedures.
If there are to be limits on the permitted campaign spending by each candidate, there must be regulations about the procedures to be followed, in order to ensure that the limits are not overstepped.
If public funds are given to assist political parties and candidates, there must be sufficiently rigorous accounting standards to create confidence that the funds have been properly used, see also Regulating Parties and Candidates.
If regulations require donors to parties and candidates to declare their gifts, mechanisms for recording contributions must be put into place.
Problems of Assuring Accountability
First, some regulations require complicated, expensive administrative mechanisms. For instance, a rule that requires political contributions above a certain threshold to be recorded and publicly listed will probably prove difficult to administer. These difficulties will face both the candidates and the political parties, and the authorities responsible for policing the
regulations. See also Breaches and penalties.
In the United States, some of the regulations involving campaign financing have become so complex and difficult to administer that candidates have been obliged to employ additional accountants and lawyers. The regulations have posed special difficulties for fringe parties, and for candidates with small budgets and a limited capacity to employ professional staffs to ensure compliance with the laws.
When legislators consider legal reforms concerning parties and candidates, they need to be aware of the administrative consequences of any new laws. The logic of requiring high standards of accountability is that care should be taken to foresee, and to avoid, rules that are unnecessarily hard to comply with and to police.
A vivid illustration is the following example taken from a note sent in 1997 from the Australian Electoral Commission to International IDEA about the implications of a problem faced by foreign officials responsible for helping to administer elections in Cambodia. This resulted from the requirement
that each party should have 5,000 members who were registered voters:
...because of the volume of names involved - around 100,000 - computerized checking had to be used ... This, however, intersected with a second problem, the lack of a standard method of rendering a particular name in Khmer text, which meant that a name as captured on the list of voters might well be spelt differently in Khmer from the name of the same person as captured on a party's list of its own members. Of course, when the names are spelled differently, the computer is unlikely to find a match. This ... was very messy to sort out. The Cambodian case illustrates a principle...: it is one thing to have what looks on the face of it like a sensible legal requirement; it is quite another thing to be able to implement it in practice, and an unworkable or unenforceable law merely brings itself into discredit.
Second, accountability and free speech are likely to conflict with each other. This is illustrated by the strict expense limits on campaign spending by candidates in parliamentary elections in Britain. In theory, a candidate could evade the limits by arranging unofficially for friends to issue supposedly independent propaganda favouring him or attacking an opponent. In order
to eliminate the possibility of such 'independent' expenditure, the law introducing spending limits also provided for a ban on independent spending. All spending must be authorized, either by the candidate or by an 'agent' formally appointed by the candidate. All campaign literature must bear the name of the person responsible for its production, so that there can be no doubt as to whether it has or has not been authorized by the candidate or the candidate's
agent.
Yet, there is clearly a heavy price to pay for ensuring accountability for each candidate's campaign budget. Genuinely independent individuals and interest groups, that might otherwise wish to express their views by printing and distributing their own campaign literature, pay the price.
Draft Only
