Specific Focus on Procedures Required
Conducting an information campaign specifically addressing voting station procedures will assist in ensuring that voters are prepared for voting when they arrive at the voting station. While much of this information is more a long-term voter education issue, there are some specific messages that will need reinforcement if voter service and voter traffic flow is to be effective. As with information on correct marking of ballots, voting procedures information is not something that voters can be expected to fully retain from election to election, even if procedures remain unchanged.
Targets and Issues
In assessing what should be included in voter information (apart from education), campaigns on voting procedures, cost-effectiveness, and potential information overload effects need to be considered. The basic questions include:
- What procedural information is vital for voters to understand before they arrive at the voting station, i.e., which issues might seriously prejudice the exercise of the right to vote or voter service if not fully understood?
- How much intensive information can voters absorb in a short period before voting day?
- What procedural information can be more cost-effectively reinforced in the voting station than by media or other information campaigns before voting day?
Vital pre-election knowledge of voting procedures would include issues such as:
Documents to Be Shown by Voters
Voters may be required to bring specific documents to the voting station to establish their identity or eligibility to vote, such as national identity cards, voter identification cards (see The Voter Identification Card: Advantages and Disadvantages), or the like. If they arrive without these, they may not be able to collect these in time to return to vote. Excluding these voters from the voting station may cause altercations that can severely disrupt the election process.
Intensive information prior to voting day on the need to bring specified documents will minimise these occurrences. It is a simple message that can be closely linked with or form part of information messages on voting days and hours and voting locations. Both mass coverage and targeting of particular voter groups who may not have access to normal mass communications will be needed.
Assisted Voting
Information on assisted voting may be more specifically targeted to particular geographic areas or through institutions and community groups dealing with physical impairment and lower literacy.
Information Content
Where voting procedures can be broadly outlined in a message which reduces them to simple steps, there are advantages in producing communications media, public display, or direct delivery information materials emphasising these steps, particularly where voting procedures have changed or there are significant numbers of registered voters with no or little experience in voting. These materials create the background message from which other more specific parts of the information campaign are developed.
The key consideration is to keep these materials simple, since this is information and not formal education, and to leave more detailed information to personal contact methods and polling official advice. Visual and aural media messages should be based on a series of simple statements that explain:
- date of voting day;
- hours voting stations are open;
- registration requirements;
- identity documents required to vote;
- eligibility verification procedures;
- voting procedures;
- voting secrecy.
This style of information message should not be used as the only information delivery mechanism. It is general reinforcement that can assist in tying together information in the voters' minds. Effective information communication will generally require specific separate messages on the vital issues, such as voting locations (see Information on Voting Locations and Hours) and correct marking or casting of ballots (see Information on How to Ensure a Vote is Valid).
Information Methods
Print media is generally more effective for this broader information format. Care must be taken to ensure that posters or print advertisements produced accommodate the literacy levels of the society. A high pictorial content can generally be more effective in explaining more complex procedures. (For examples of simple posters illustrating voting, see Voting Process - El Salvador, Voting Process - Haiti and Voting Process - Bosnia-Herzegovina.)
Television can also be used effectively. For an example of a simple video script, used against a visual background of a voting station in operation, see Method of Voting Instructions, Trinidad and Tobago.)
The number of different steps in voting procedures messages being delivered may make radio use less than ideal. Community meetings, simulations, and displays are also an effective means of delivering this more complex message.
Voters Guides
In more literate or developed societies, the publication of a voters guide, delivered to voters' registered address or available from public locations, can provide full information on all voting procedures to an assured target audience. For an example of such a voters guide see Your Guide to Voting in the 1996 Election - New Zealand.)
Personal addressing of such guides, rather than household drops, while more expensive, will assist in ensuring that all voters have access to the information. This may be particularly relevant in reaching groups such as women in households where they have been traditionally excluded from decision-making processes. Support for this by media advertising advising voters that they should have received this information, and giving a contact number to arrange re-supply if necessary, is useful both to raise readership of the guide and to correct delivery errors.
On Voting Day
The need to bring prescribed identity documents to the voting station is a message to be reinforced through the media on voting day itself and can be combined with messages reinforcing that it is voting day and the hours of operation of voting stations. By voting day, information on the steps in voting processes is probably better left to voting station officials, or personal contact through information centres, rather than complicating the media message. Information services offices and any telephone inquiry services should also be operating at least throughout the hours of voting.
In voting stations themselves, specific voting operations officials can usefully be assigned to answering procedural queries from voters (see Staff Categories and Duties), supported by visual materials in key areas of the voting station, particularly around areas where voters queue to vote. Subject matter can address both what is expected of voters and the services provided in the voting station. (For an example of a simple voting station poster showing voters how they will be processed through the voting station, see Voting Station Layout Poster - Trinidad and Tobago, and for further information on this issue, see Information at Voting Locations.)
Special Voting Facilities
For a discussion of voter information programs on procedures for special voting facilities, see Information on How to Ensure a Vote is Valid and Information on Voting Eligibility and Methods.
