Electoral Administration Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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As a topic for political science, electoral administration is a relative newcomer. While democratic theorists such as nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill were interested in electoral systems, they had little interest in the administrative underpinnings of democratic elections or what was needed to make them free and fair in practice.

Growth

All this changed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when there was a tripling of the number of democracies in the world. The introduction of competitive elections required the development of electoral authorities that could be trusted to administer elections impartially. At the same time, electoral administration was acquiring a more professional and independent status in many established democracies, and a new premium was being placed on expertise in the field. Internationally there was increased networking and sharing of knowledge in addition to the provision of election assistance.

Bodies such as the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) and the Washington-based IFES (formerly the International Foundation for Election Systems) have played an important role in the development of international standards and the dissemination of good practice models. IDEA is an intergovernmental body launched in 1995, while IFES is a nongovernmental organization dating from 1987. Together with the United Nations and some national election bodies, they have joined in sponsoring the Administration and Cost of Elections Project. The Administration and Cost of Elections Electoral Knowledge Network provides comparative resources and data, practitioner networking, and capacity building. While the focus of international work on electoral administration has tended to be on assisting new democracies, the criteria that have been generated for assessing good electoral administration can be applied to any democracy.

Electoral administration covers all the steps in the electoral process: determining electoral boundaries; determining and registering those eligible to vote; registering political parties and handling candidate nomination processes; applying rules relating to the campaign period, including regulations relating to campaign finance and other aspects of campaigning; conducting elections; counting the votes; and finalizing the results. These functions may be performed by one or more election related bodies, disputed returns may be adjudicated by special courts, and parliamentary bodies may provide multiparty oversight. The degree to which an electoral management body has control over electoral processes will be determined by the way it is authorized—whether through constitutional provisions or parliamentary legislation.

Principles And Characteristics

In Electoral Management Design: The International IDEA Handbook (2006), Alan Wall and his colleagues identify basic principles and characteristics that form standards for electoral administration: respect for the law; fairness, impartiality, and neutrality; equity; integrity; voting secrecy; transparency and accountability; effectiveness; service-mindedness; sustainability; and accuracy and efficiency.

Wall and his colleagues further identify three basic models of electoral administration: independent, institutionally independent from the executive; government, within or under the direction of a minister and department; and mixed, a combination of the first two models with a degree of institutional independence, but under the direction and control of the government of the day. To determine where an electoral administration belongs, seven criteria are used: institutional arrangement, the relationship between the agency and the government; implementation, the level of autonomy the agency has in developing and implementing policy; formal accountability, whether it is accountable to the government executive, Parliament, or head of state; powers, the ability to develop the regulatory framework; composition, whether the agency is led by government members or persons selected from outside of government; term of office, security of tenure; and budget, the level of control it has over its own budget.

Another method of categorizing electoral authorities is focusing on who is appointed to head the agency. Louis Massicotte, André Blais, and Antoine Yoshinaka, in Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies (2004), differentiate between the appointment of multiple commissioners representing a diversity of political views and therefore balancing partisan views, a government minister’s being in charge of the electoral process, and the appointment of a single, independent commissioner (or commissioners).

Diversity

Examples of a single body’s managing most aspects of national elections include the Australian Electoral Commission and Elections Canada. These bodies differ in the manner of appointment and tenure of the chief electoral official (in Canada it is Parliament rather than government that is responsible for the appointment, which is to age sixty-five), but in both cases their independence from partisan influences is jealously guarded. Australia has been a pioneer in the development of professionalized and independent electoral administration since the invention of the Australian ballot in the mid-nineteenth century.

A more fragmented administrative arrangement can be found in the United Kingdom, where local government authorities have traditionally been responsible for voter registration and the conduct of elections. In addition, the Electoral Commission, established in 2000, is responsible for party registration, oversight of rules relating to party finance, disclosure of campaign donations and expenditure, public education, and policy advice. Separate again are Boundary Commissions and, since 1947, a Committee on Party Political Broadcasting, which brings together broadcasters and political parties to decide on the allocation of broadcast time. Paid political advertising is not allowed.

The United States has had the most extreme case of decentralized electoral administration for its national elections. The Federal Electoral Commission is responsible only for the regulation of campaign finance and is an example of a bipartisan rather than a nonpartisan electoral body. Its members may have active party links, as do electoral officials in the fifty states and forty-six hundred local authorities who are responsible for the actual conduct of national elections and voter registration and have very different approaches. One result of partisan involvement in all levels of U.S. electoral administration, including redistricting, can be a lack of trust in the outcomes; another is that all aspects of the electoral process become subject to litigation.

European and Latin American countries tend to have a national register of their citizens, and this is used for the compilation of the electoral register. This means that the electoral management body does not have responsibility for registration, and the updating is done instead by the body responsible for the civil register—in Sweden, for example, it is the National Tax Agency. Such arrangements greatly reduce the cost of voter registration, but in countries where distrust of government is high, the idea of such centralized databases may prompt fears of inappropriate data sharing.

Campaign Finance

Campaign finance is a major issue in terms of a level playing field for elections, and many democracies have moved to tighten control over the source and level of donations to political parties and candidates. Canada has recently banned all corporate or union donations, while the United Kingdom has tightened its disclosure requirements. One fear on the part of electoral management bodies is that through the auditing of political party and third-party finances, the electoral management bodies will be drawn into partisan controversy, hence undermining public confidence in the integrity of electoral administration. This is but one of the many dilemmas that arise within electoral administration; all models have both strengths and weaknesses that deserve greater attention from political science.

Bibliography:

ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, www.aceproject.org.
Hughes, Colin, “The Independence of Electoral Administration,” Senate Occasional Lecture Series, March 23, 2007, www.aph.gov.au/Senate/ pubs/occa_lect/transcripts/230307/230307.pdf.
International Foundation for Election Systems, www.ifes.org.
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). Code of Conduct: Ethical and Professional Administration of Elections. Stockholm, Sweden: International IDEA, 1997.
idea.int. Maley, Michael. “Administration of Elections.” In International Encyclopedia of
Election, edited by Richard Rose, 6–14. London: Macmillan, 2000.
Massicotte, Louis, André Blais, and Antoine Yoshinaka. Establishing the Rules of the Game: Election Laws in Democracies. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Wall, Alan, Andrew Ellis, Ayman Ayoub, Carl W. Dundas, Joram Rukambe, and Sara Staino. Electoral Management Design: The International IDEA Handbook. Stockholm, Sweden: International IDEA, 2006.