Observer organisations need to determine on the basis of effectiveness, available personnel, financial resources, and the environment in the target country whether to undertake long-term electoral monitoring or short-term election observation programs.
Long-Term Monitoring
Many of the activities that significantly affect election outcomes occur well before, or after, voting day. The voter registration system and its implementation, for instance, can have a greater, yet less visible, affect on election results than voting or ballot counting errors and fraud, including:
- laws governing voter eligibility and equity in their application;
- public access to and methods of initial registration, changing registration and purging outdated or incorrect data;
- the reliability and accuracy of administrative systems and of the voters lists they produce.
Laws governing and methods for determining electoral district boundaries can be constructed in ways that might give reasonable assurance of particular interests group's desired election result. Decisions on voting methods and locations selected may deny equality of voting access or enable questionable access for groups with particular political allegiances.
The manner in which voter education and information is approached will affect people's knowledge of registration and voting processes and thus their ability to cast a valid vote. The range of parties and candidates and parties that are willing, and determined as eligible, to contest the election will affect available choices at the ballot box, as well the conduct of any primary elections for candidates.
The environment during political campaign periods will influence voting behaviour. This will be seen in terms of the freedom for parties to put their views to the voting public, open access and equal treatment by media, and freedom for voters to support the candidate or party of their choice without fear of intimidation or penalty. After voting day, the manner in which results are determined from vote counts, and then translated into the formation of an executive body, will determine whether election outcomes are in accord with the votes cast.
There is, therefore, a very strong case for much greater attention to be paid by observation projects to all the activities both before and after election day. A significant benefit of long-term monitoring is that interim reporting during the course of the project may provide leverage to influence executive authorities or election administrators to rectify errors or to amend frameworks or procedures to solve potential problems identified by the observers.
For most circumstances, observer projects should attempt to have some monitoring staff in place, at the very latest, at the time the election is formally announced. If risks during the pre-voting day stage are assessed as low, this may be only a small presence. For elections in states emerging from civil conflict or in transitional processes to democracy, there are benefits in observation commencing while the transitional processes are being negotiated and the electoral framework determined.
Even in societies with a relatively stable democratic history, the monitoring period may need to be lengthy (for example where continuous voter registration systems are used), or be discontinuous, where significant events such as a census-type voter registration or establishment of party and candidate eligibility occurs well before the election.
Short-Term Observation
Whether short-term election observation--that is, observation limited to voting day and the count--is a stand-alone activity or part of a longer-term monitoring process, it is a major deployment challenge. Longer-term monitoring programs assist voting day observer deployment by allowing a more gradual build-up of observers to voting day strength, and provide a core of short-term observation staff with local field experience. Where short-term observation is a stand-alone activity, the margin to handle deployment errors is very slim; precise planning and accurate implementation is vital. In such cases, there is a trade-off between timing of deployment and numbers of observers, as well as intensity of coverage, to provide a cost-effective result within the available budget.
In planning observer deployment for voting day and ballot counts, scheduling must allow for coverage of critical activities. In general, these activities should include observation of the:
- opening and closing of voting stations;
- operation of voting stations during voting hours;
- completion of ballot accounting records;
- commencement of ballot counts;
- reconciliation of counting centre figures;
- transmission and receipt of individual counting centre vote totals.
Other specific critical times and locations should be identified by risk analyses of the particular election environment. These critical areas could include:
- voting stations with a large military or security forces voting population;
- geographic areas with a substantial political or ethnic minority population;
- areas where the independence of electoral management bodies has been questioned;
- significant absentee or foreign country voting locations.
Appropriate Balances
The appropriate balance between long-term and short-term observation will vary according to each country's circumstances as revealed during the risk analysis of election activities. Experience from past election observation projects is that a long-term monitoring capacity is essential for the observation project to make informed judgments on the overall freedom and fairness of election outcomes. Given the sheer volume of electoral activity on and around voting day, the numbers of staff deployed (and hence costs) will generally need to be skewed towards the short-term observation phase.
