The values that educators espouse and their own experience and background will have an impact on where education is made available, who receives the programme, and what the programme covers. In resource-rich situations, this may not be a problem, but in countries with limited resources, special care will have to be given to making sure that certain voters are not ignored.
Voter educators employed by the election authorities may not be able to shrug off particular groups of learners because they do not like them or consider them to be irrelevant. But even they are not immune from personal bias. Nonstatutory educators, on the other hand, make decisions all the time about which groups of people they intend to work with and which they intend to ignore. In most cases these decisions are made on the basis of a set of operating values that may be explicit, and hence transparent and predictable. But this is not always the case. Sometimes, NGOs and community organisations can be blind to their own biases.
As a result of these values and biases, it may happen that particular targets and constituencies get a great deal of attention and others none at all. Where there is transparency on the part of educators, official voter programmes can choose to 'fill the gaps.' Or they may identify particular sets of voters on the basis of the value system espoused by the electoral authorities or simply undertake a general voter education program and require that nonstatutory groups either 'fill the gaps' or target groups with special needs. The crucial issue here is to make the values and biases upon which decisions are made visible, if only to the education planners themselves.
In addition to choices about particular target groups, educator values can also determine in advance certain choices about educational needs. Often, election authorities may be chosen for their legal background or even seconded from the judicial branch. They may have vast experience in the government bureaucracy and be familiar with all pertinent laws, regulations, and procedures. At the same time, they may be quite far removed from the administrative concerns of poll workers and the information and awareness levels of ordinary voters. Ideally, there should be a dialogue between the educator (who has something) and the learner (who wants something)--especially when the learners are adults--in order to identify educational needs. The decisions about what the educator will offer and how, the educational needs deemed to be appropriate, and which of these will be addressed are all value decisions.
Where there are a large number of educational initiatives, and unlimited resources, it may not be necessary to worry too much about these questions. Planning can make use of the various interests being expressed by voter educators to ensure general coverage. But this may not always be the case, particularly in developing countries and transitional settings, so care will have to be taken to ensure that there are not system breakdowns (i.e., unanticipated gaps that lead to failure of the programme) because educators decided not to provide education in a particular language, or to a certain target group, or to a particular village, or even a particular radio station or newspaper.
Care also has to be taken to make sure that choices do not devour resources in favour of one group at the expense of another because they know how to vote or they never vote or even, in the worst of all possible scenarios, because 'they will vote for them rather than us.'
