Community Representation in Staff
Elections are a participatory community activity. Recruitment policies for voting operations should aim not only to select officials who are capable but also who reflect the variety of the community in which they are working, rather than limit recruitment to particular gender, nationality, linguistic, religious, caste, socio-economic, or age segments.
Advantages of Representative Staffing
There are a number of advantages in this approach, including:
- A wider pool of potentially skilled staff is available.
- Greater awareness of election processes and their integrity throughout all community sectors is stimulated.
- For voting activities involving public contact, particularly in voting stations, community representation in staffing can enhance voter service, with particular relevance in multi-cultural societies where engagement of minority group staff can assist greatly with overcoming difficulties with language or basic understanding of voting procedures.
- In a more general sense, voter service can be improved, and the potential for disputes in voting stations minimised, by making voters feel more comfortable in the voting stations through seeing that there are officials from their particular societal group present, which in turn tends to promote the legitimacy of the voting process.
- Given the relatively large numbers of staff to be recruited, it can be used as a social policy instrument to promote participation by community sectors seen as disadvantaged or under-represented in public or private socio-economic sectors.
Measures To Enhance Representativity
Specific measures that could be taken to promote balanced representation in voting operations staff include:
- recruiting staff for voting stations and administrative assistance from within the local area, which may require additional recruitment efforts, or providing increased training in basic skills as well as voting procedures;
- through the work of civic and voter educators' public information sessions, encouraging women, minority cultural and language communities, and specific age sectors to apply for voting operations staff positions;
- employing members of minority cultural or language groups in voting stations as interpreters or voter information staff for their communities;
- ensuring that persons with prominent positions of power in the community do not emerge as voting station officials through patronage or other influence. Faced with voting station officials who in other roles have decision-making powers over their daily lives, some voters may feel intimidated, particularly in societies without a tradition of free and open electoral systems.
