Significant Issues
In ensuring that an appropriate method of recruitment is in place, the electoral management body must not only determine responsibilities for recruitment and qualifications required for staff, but also:
- the methods for making initial contact with potential staff;
- how applicants are to be assessed as suitable and selected for available positions;
- the method by which staff are to be formally appointed and contracted;
- how to monitor the numbers of staff appointed to ensure that all staffing requirements are satisfied.
Initial Contact
In recruiting voting operations staff, there are various ways initial approaches can be made. The approach taken will be influenced by factors such as:
- whether there is a contactable pool of experienced staff from past elections;
- whether there have been changes in the electoral system, eligibility to vote, or redistricting.
Methods of contact could include:
- direct written or other personal contact with potential staff;
- targeting particular professional groups which may be seen as having the qualifications necessary for polling staff or be particularly suited to voting operations duties;
- seeking recommendations of potential staff from community, civic, and occupational groups;
- inviting seconding or nominations of staff from other state agencies;
- advertising voting operations vacancies through community or mass media, meetings, and public information campaigns;
- requesting civic educators to identify potential staff;
- requesting voting station managers to recruit staff for their voting station.
Direct Contact
Where a contactable pool of experienced voting operations officials exists, direct written or other personal contact with potential staff can be the most cost-effective way to meet the major portion of staffing requirements. However, without effective mechanisms for evaluating staff performance at previous elections, the cost-effectiveness may be illusory.
Reliance solely on this method can also lead to a restricted field of potential polling officials. New candidates with superior abilities may not get the chance to prove themselves, and any past restrictive patterns of employment with regard to gender, minority groups, or groups only recently eligible to vote may be perpetuated.
Targeting Specific Groups
Occupational groups that could be seen as having skills relevant to voting operations would include lawyers, educators, state employees, bank employees, and local municipal staff. There may be advantages in targeting particular professional or occupational groups, particularly in less literate societies, where in some geographic areas there may be a limited number of individuals with the ability to perform voting operations functions.
Teachers may be a rich source of voting operations staff, because they will also have the advantage of site familiarity (and perhaps an enhanced ability to assist with site equipment and facilities) where school locations are used as voting sites (see Locations of Voting Sites).
Seeking Recommendations
Civic and community groups, particularly in areas of lower employment, may be well placed to recommend those with skills appropriate for voting operations employment. Similarly, occupational and employment groups or societies may have significant local knowledge of potential staff. Recommended staff could either contact, or be contacted by, voting operations administrators to establish their interest.
Where the staffing framework requires the appointment of independent staff, political organisations should not be approached for recommendations of suitable staff.
Seconding of Staff
There may be risks in accepting direct nominations for voting operations staff positions from other state or judicial authorities. Where institutional political neutrality is not well established, this can lead to public perceptions of lack of impartiality on the part of the electoral management body. If such nominations are provided, the electoral management body must still test these applicants against the qualifications required for voting operations duties--most importantly, political neutrality--and have the authority to accept or reject each applicant.
Use of employees of other state organisations, however, can be a cost-effective method of staffing voting operations. Seconding from other state authorities may incur little in apparent additional costs, since these costs remain with the seconding agencies. Particularly if voting day is on a normal work day for such employees, the staffing costs for voting stations can appear to be minimised, but the true cost of the staff remains the same in work foregone for their actual duties.
What employees of other state organisations may bring that can assist voting operations, particularly in less developed countries, is familiarity with basic bureaucratic processes, such as how to use communications systems, deal with people, notions of accountability and public service, and adherence to process. Otherwise, these skills may need to be instilled in other potential staff. Thus, using employees of other state organisations may lead to savings in training and performance enhancement costs.
There may also be opportunities for seconding of staff from private sector employers that could be pursued. This could support the administration or implementation of highly skilled generalist technical functions--such as logistics and auditing--where relevant skills are not available within the electoral management body.
Public Advertising
Advertising for voting operations officials through community or mass media, meetings, and public information campaigns promotes transparency and equity in the recruitment process and can provide a wide pool of potential staff from a diverse range of cultural and geographic backgrounds. The downside of this is that it may create extra workloads in assessing the suitability of all applicants. (For examples of information pamphlets and bulletins for potential voting operations staff, see Election Judge Recruitment Information - USA, Illinois and The Chesterfield Voter - USA, Chesterfield County.)
Recommendations from Civic Educators
Requesting civic educators to identify potential staff during their visits to communities can be particularly effective in geographic areas where the electoral management body does not have a permanent administrative presence. It can also decrease the staff selection workload, since potential staff have already been screened by persons with some knowledge of election processes and staff duties.
Recruitment by Voting Station Managers
Using a 'cascade' system of recruitment, in which the electoral management body recruits voting station managers, who are then responsible for recruiting their own staff, can significantly disperse recruitment workloads and ease the pressure on election administration staff. It also provides another layer of accountability and ownership of management duties for voting station managers. It can be a useful method for recruiting officials for voting stations in more remote areas. However, it can make quality control of the recruitment process more controversial. As with other methods of recruitment, the actual approval of employment of these voting station officials should remain with specified staff of the electoral management body.
Applications for Employment
Particularly if not previously employed for voting operations duties, people wishing to be employed should provide some form of application. In general, such applications should be written and require an indication of the applicant's abilities for the qualifications required (see Recruitment Standards). In areas of low literacy, where equity considerations have modified literacy requirements for voting station staff undertaking less responsible positions, meetings of potential staff may need to be organised and application and selection proceedings may be conducted on an oral basis.
Selecting Staff to be Offered Employment
Staff for voting operations should be selected strictly according to the qualifications necessary for the functions that they will have to perform (see Recruitment Standards). It is preferable that there is some method of assessing the quality of potential voting operations staff before employment is offered, rather than discovering unsuitability during training, with the attendant additional costs of rejection at that stage.
Assessment could be made in the following ways:
- where the applicant has previously worked in elections, review any assessments made of their performance;
- where there is no such history, administer an examination that tests the applicant's experience and skills against the required qualifications and voting operations duty descriptions (see Application for Employment, Australia).
Special arrangements for assessment will need to be made if there are representativity considerations requiring employment of less literate persons for some positions.
It is important that the selection process be conducted in a transparent manner (see Transparency in Recruitment). Depending on time and other limitations, applicants would preferably be met and interviewed before any decision on offering them employment is made. (For examples of recruitment tests and assessments, see Polling Official Interview Assessment - Australia and Electoral Staff Assessment - New Zealand 1996.)
Offers of employment should generally be made according to order of ranking against the qualifications required, though this may need to be modified in order to meet representativeness criteria. Where any such modification of merit selection is made, any representativeness criteria applied should be publicly available and transparent.
Appointment of Staff
Staff appointed to voting operations positions should receive a formal contract for their services. (For contract offers and confirmation documentation, see Staff Appointment Documentation. For issues to be considered in developing staff contract contents, see Nature of Appointments.)
Contingency Staff
The number of staff selected needs to account not only for the identified positions to be filled but also for potential contingencies (see Contingency Staff). Recruitment should identify sufficient excess staff to be trained to cover for:
- staff who drop out or are otherwise found to be unsuitable during the training phase;
- staff who become unavailable for personal or other reasons between the time of recruitment and voting day;
- voting day contingencies.
Sufficient staff should be formally appointed to cover voting day contingencies, relating to:
- voter turnout where historic data or flexibility in voting methods available do not allow accurate prediction of voter turnout or voting peaks at all voting stations;
- staff absences or failures to report for duty on voting day.
Monitoring
After the number of vacancies for staff in various categories (for voting stations, ballot counting centres, administrative support) has been established, monitoring systems are necessary to ensure that staff allocations proceed efficiently and that any additional recruitment action or review of previously unsuccessful applicants can be implemented in a timely fashion. Such monitoring would include tracking:
- staff who have accepted positions against locations;
- vacancies remaining;
- satisfactory training completion;
- reserve staff.
Given the likely time constraints on the recruitment process, it is also vital that basic administrative controls are effectively executed to ensure that the correct offer and contract documentation is sent to, and is returned from, all the correct individuals at the correct time.
