Voter Registration

Topic IndexAdvantages

The advantages of a continuous list of voters include the following:

It allows the list to be open for public inspection at all times during the year, not only during a specified period.

The cost of registering voters is spread across the entire period between elections, allowing for consistent budget planning. Despite this distribution of costs, there is still likely to be a cost spike at the time of the election or registration drive.

Because work is spread out throughout the year, funding does not require a steep rise in any one year or during any one period.

Partial elections create no particular election administration problem as the list is always ready.

The continuous list allows for a shorter time frame for the completion of the final voters list. For example, the adoption of a continuous list in 1997 enabled the campaign period for Canadian federal elections to be reduced by two weeks (from forty-eight to thirty-five days).

There is a relatively long time frame for making changes and corrections to the voters list when using the continuous list, because changes can be made throughout the year, not only during specific registration drives.

The continuous list can provide opportunities for developing efficiencies in the creation of a voters list. For example, when Elections Canada decided to adopt a continuous list of voters, one of the strongest arguments offered was the cost savings achieved by sharing data between federal and provincial election authorities. This information sharing is facilitated by the existence of a continuous list. This is not to suggest that a continuous list is necessarily and on its own a less costly method of registration compared to the periodic list. It does suggest, however, that efficiencies are possible with this method in some contexts.

A continuous list enables the government to use the voters list for other elections, such as industrial elections in Australia, or jury lists in the United States.

A continuous list can result in higher rates of voter registration because of the ongoing character of the registration process. On the other hand, the experience in many jurisdictions using continuous lists is that they are no more complete than enumeration and may actually be less complete, which has been shown to be the case, for example, in British Columbia.⁴⁹ In the 1997 Canadian federal election, 4.6 percent of the final enrolment was captured in the revision stage and through election day registration; in Australia in 1996, five hundred thirty-two thousand transactions (additions, deletions, alterations) were made in the week set aside for that after the continuous list had officially closed and immediately before the election. That figure amounted to 4.6 percent of the total Australian eligible electorate on election day, exactly the same percentage as in Canada. And the latter situation occurred in a country that continuously updates its list using computers and compulsory registration.

In federal states, continuous lists enable the sharing of registration information across levels of government, thereby minimizing duplication.