Fair and Transparent Process
The identification of voters is the process of verifying potential voters and entering their names
and other substantiating information on a voters list. If the registration of voters is to be fair,
comprehensive and inclusive, effective measures must be taken to ensure that potential voters
are aware of the registration process and that they have reasonable opportunity to complete it.
For these reasons, voter education campaigns can play an important role in the electoral process.
Voter education programs can emphasize the importance of registration, citizens' responsibilities
in becoming registered, and information on how to complete the registration process.
Who is Responsible--Citizen or the State?
The manner in which registration takes place, as well as the complementary responsibilities of
election administration officials and citizens, vary considerably from one system to another. In
some instances registration is primarily the responsibility of the citizens. They must initiate the
registration process by making first contact with the election administration, as is true in the
United States. In other cases, election officials are responsible either for maintaining continuous
voting lists or for developing new lists. This is often accomplished by conducting a periodic
door-to-door enumeration or by establishing local registration centers.
In practice, the responsibility for initiating contact is often shared between citizens and the state.
In Mexico, where a continuous voters list is used, for example, the election authority devotes
considerable effort to making registration accessible by establishing thousands of voter
registration centers, including mobile units. It is still up to citizens, however, to visit the
registration kiosks and formally initiate their registration.
Experience in the United States and other countries where voters initiate registration has
shown that making the registration process convenient can significantly increase participation.
In the final analysis, the issue is one of access. How much responsibility does the state have to
give citizens access or the opportunity to register without undue hardship? The answer is that
the state must assume considerable responsibility to ensure that registration does not become an
administrative barrier to participation in democratic elections. The countervailing pressure in
this effort, of course, is usually cost, an issue often underlying practical voter registration efforts.
Cost and Comprehensiveness -- A Trade-off
In the process of identifying voters, policy makers are faced with evaluating comprehensiveness,
for instance, in light of its overall cost. Voters lists tend to be less expensive to develop when
the greater responsibility for registration rests with the voters. In these instances, election
administration officials have a responsibility to ensure that voters are made aware of the
registration requirements as well as the procedures that must be followed to complete
registration.
On the other hand, the election administration may choose not to assume responsibility for
identifying potential voters who do not themselves initiate the process of registration. Voters
lists produced under these conditions, therefore, tend to be less comprehensive than those
compiled through state initiative. In addition, there are often groups of citizens who are less
likely to identify themselves as eligible voters and register. Typically, these will include
younger citizens, the aged and those suffering from ill health, the less affluent, the illiterate, and
those from rural areas where transportation is a problem.
Performance Criteria
In evaluating a voter registration system, it is helpful to establish clear performance criteria
against which overall utility and cost effectiveness can be measured. For periodic voters lists,
this would include accuracy as well as comprehensiveness, or completeness.
'Comprehensiveness' refers to the proportion of eligible voters who are actually included on the
voters list. 'Accuracy' obviously refers to whether the data on individual voters is entered in
the voters list with or without errors. That is to ask, are the name, address, gender, age,
citizenship and any other variables correct and free from error? With the continuous voters list
or a civil registry, accuracy often is a function of currency, or timely updating of data. The
primary concern here is whether on election day the information about voters on the list is
consistent with their current circumstances. Have the most recent changes in such data as
residence, name, or age, for example, been included in the voters list or not?
Specific performance targets for each area of voter registration are useful in achieving universal
suffrage. Harry Neufeld, an election administration consultant, has used targets of 90 percent
complete, 85 percent current, and 97 percent accurate in maintaining a continuous list.13
In other words, the system was evaluated with the expectation that nine out of ten eligible
citizens should be on the list, in eight and one half instances out of ten the voter's information
would be current, and only three records in a hundred might have data entry errors. Once these
targets, or benchmarks, are identified, the incremental costs for achieving them can be
calculated.
As the proportion of registered voters increases, however, and as the other performance targets
come into play, the marginal cost of registering additional voters escalates. The first voters to be
registered are relatively inexpensive. They may have been at home when the enumerators
called. Or they may have responded without delay to a mailed request for updated registration
information. And if they had no changes to record, the information about them on the voters list
remained current and accurate. For potential voters who do not satisfy there conditions, election
administrators must bear additional costs to gather and update their data. Also, some voters who
are more difficult to reach may require more than one attempt to contact them. The more
comprehensive, accurate and current the voters list may become, therefore, the more expensive
the effort.
Specific examples may help illustrate this maxim. If the first target is ninety-percent
comprehensiveness, then, one approach might entail maintaining a continuous list that included
voters living abroad. The expense of maintaining such a list, however, may be prohibitive for
many countries. One cost-conscious solution might be to develop a separate registration system
for nationals living abroad. This is done in Australia. Citizens living abroad are not kept on the
active domestic voters lists. Instead, these voters must register at their own initiative for each
electoral event.
Similarly, when currency as a performance criteria sets a target with respect to the percentage of
voters currently residing at the addresses listed in the register, it is often common to find that
different areas of a country have quite different rates of residential mobility. People may move
more often in densely populated urban centres, for example, and younger voters, such as college
students, may reflect a high rate of mobility or transience. Ensuring an eighty-five-percent
currency rate would likely require more frequent updating of the voters list in those areas, while
in others, the list would remain current at that performance level for considerably longer. It
might prove more useful, therefore, to work with national (or regional) average mobility rates,
rather than with highly localized rates.
