Comparative Electoral Management

Performance, Networks and Instruments

Toby S. James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134820986
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers the first comparative monograph on the management of elections.

The book defines electoral management as a new, inter-disciplinary area and advances a realist sociological approach to study it. A series of new, original frameworks are introduced, including the PROSeS framework, which can be used by academics and practitioners around the world to evaluate electoral management quality. A networked governance approach is also introduced to understand the full range of collaborative actors involved in delivering elections, including civil society and the international community. Finally, the book evaluates some of the policy instruments used to improve the integrity of elections, including voter registration reform, training and the funding of elections. Extensive mixed methods are used throughout including thematic analysis of interviews, (auto-)ethnography, comparative historical analysis and, cross-national and national surveys of electoral officials.

This text will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners interested and involved in electoral integrity and elections, and more broadly to comparative politics, public administration, international relations and democracy studies.

Chapters 1 and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Foundations

1 Introduction

1.1 Why electoral management matters

In the immediate aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan Presidential election, the country entered into a political, economic and humanitarian crisis. Post-election violence erupted leading to estimates of over 1,000 people being killed by police, criminal gangs and militia groups, and 660,000 displacements, as opponents of President Mwai Kibaki alleged electoral manipulation (CBS News 2008; Kenny 2019). Tensions were deeply rooted in Kenya’s political history. The sequence of events surrounding the conduct of the vote count were the immediate sparks for the conflict, however. An announcement from the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) about the result was expected by 10am on Sunday 30 December at the latest, three days after the poll, But there were repeated delays. Rumours circulated that the results were being rigged by the ECK to favour the President (Throup 2008). In its evaluation of the election, the European Union Election Observation Mission (2008, 1) concluded that:

Kenya fell short of key international and regional standards for democratic elections. Most significantly, the electoral process suffered from a lack of transparency in the processing and tallying of results, which undermined the confidence in the accuracy of the final result of the presidential election… . This overall conclusion is all the more regrettable, since in advance of the tallying process and despite some significant shortcomings in the legal framework, the elections were generally well administered and freedoms of expression, association and assembly were generally respected.

Kenya 2007 highlights the high stakes involved in delivering elections and the consequences of getting it wrong. Kenya’s experience was evidence that fragile multi-party systems can quickly fall apart under intense political pressure (Cheeseman 2008). It wasn’t a gerrymandered electoral system that was to blame, or the role of money in politics – the traditional sources of concern about electoral integrity. Instead, it was the logistical delivery of the electoral process.

Problems with the delivery of elections are not uncommon and found in established democracies alongside electoral autocracies and transitioning democracies, however. The 2000 US Presidential election infamously exposed shortcomings in America’s electoral machinery with confusing ballot papers, faulty equipment, queues at polling stations, problems with absentee ballots and citizens missing from the electoral registers (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2001; Wand et al. 2001). In the UK, at midnight on Friday 7 May 2010, with the result of the UK general election unclear, the BBC News carried the headlines that the election had been marred by widespread errors with electoral administration. Hundreds of voters in Chester were unable to cast a ballot because of an out-of-date electoral register; long queues formed in Sheffield and Leeds leaving voters ‘locked out’ when polls closed at midnight; polling stations in Liverpool reported that they had run out of ballot papers. Some dissatisfied voters staged sit-ins to protest against what they called ‘disenfranchisement’ (Channel 4 News 2010). ‘It sounds like a disgrace from beginning to end, the way that this election has been handled’, exclaimed the BBC’s TV presenter David Dimbleby, who was questioning the Chair of the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, live on air as the news unfolded (BBC News 2010). Elsewhere, the completeness and accuracy of electoral registers have been questioned in Ireland (James 2012, 185–90) and New Zealand (Downes 2014). Poor ballot paper design invalidated many votes in Indonesia (Schmidt 2010; Sukma 2009) and Scotland (Denver, Johns, and Carmen 2009). Over 1,300 votes were lost in a knife-edge Western Australian Senate recount race (Lion 2013). In the 2013 Malaysia election, election officials were criticised for not shaking the bottles of indelible ink, meaning that some citizens could wash off the ink and double vote (Lai 2013). Most bizarrely, in the small village of Wallsburg, Utah, part-time election officials forgot to run the election. Twice. First in 2011, and then again in 2013. To the hilarity of the US media, County Clerk Brent Titcomb said local officials in the sleepy hamlet of approximately 300 residents had forgotten to advertise for candidates: ‘They just went on without doing anything … close to the election day, they called to ask what they should do’ (Associated Press 2013). A local resident commented that ‘they got in a whole bunch of trouble’ (Smart 2015).

Elections, it is often said, are the most complex logistical event to be organised during peacetime. These anecdotes and examples routinely catch headlines as they are picked up by journalists and quickly circulated over social media, suggest that societies often fail to deliver elections successfully. But there has been relatively little academic attention on the management of elections. This begs the question of whether, if we begin to turn over the rocks and look underneath, we will find fundamental problems in elections up and down the land, even in established democracies? Or will we instead find that elections are generally well run by dedicated, professional and hard-working electoral officials? Are they officials who don’t deserve the tough press and populist criticism that they receive?

This book aims to provide some tools and methods to find out and consider what can be done to improve the delivery of elections, which will be of use worldwide. This introductory chapter begins by arguing that the study of the delivery of elections, electoral management, has been fundamentally overlooked in the academic literature. The concept of electoral management is defined and arguments made for an inter-disciplinary approach to the topic. Evidence is provided of the considerable variation in the quality of delivery worldwide. The chapter explains why electoral management matters. An overview of the book ahead is then set out.

1.2 Electoral management: the new sub-field

Electoral studies is widely thought to be one of the most established areas of political science (Htun and Powell 2013). There is a major hole in the centre of the study of elections, however. There has been a lengthy scholarship on why people vote for candidates and parties. There have been considerable efforts to understand how electoral institutions such as the voting system, boundaries, electoral finance and voting technologies shape political outcomes (see Table 1.1 below). We know in detail how electoral systems can affect whether people vote, the nature of the party system and who wins elections. There have been many lengthy studies on the funding of political parties and candidates. The choice of methods used to register electors and cast votes has seen significant attention with many studies looking at the effects of voting by post, early voting and internet voting. Elections are not just about designing laws and procedures, however. Once a law or rule has been made, it needs to be implemented. Resources need to be mobilised, staff recruited and motivated, technology designed. Electoral management therefore refers to the organisations, networks, resources, micro anthropological working practices and instruments involved in implementing elections.

Table 1.1 Foci of study within electoral studies

The management of elections remains chronically under-researched around the world. Given that elections have been conducted in many countries for centuries, this is an extraordinary oversight. As recently as 1999, Robert Pastor complained that he was ‘unable to locate a book or even an article on election commissions or their history’ (Pastor 1999a, 76). Since then a number of significant reports have been published by international organisations (López-Pinter 2000; Wall et al. 2006), but these do not fully connect to the literature on democratic theory or assess electoral management through academic methods. The 2000 Presidential election rekindled an enormous interest in the choice of voting technologies (how are people registered? how do they cast their vote?) in the USA (Alvarez, Atkeson, and Hall 2012; Atkeson et al. 2010; Gronke, Miller, and Galances-Rosenbaum 2007; Kiewiet et al. 2008), but this research is predominately concerned with evaluating the effects of voting technologies rather than the design of electoral management bodies (EMBs) and the management of the people within these organisations. Some work eventually followed on poll workers (Claassen et al. 2008; Hall, Quin Monson, and Patterson 2009). Poll worker studies eventually expanded to reach Europe (Clark and James 2017; Goerres and Funk 2019). Studies also sought to establish whether an EMB with de jure independence would positively affect electoral integrity (Hartlyn, McCoy, and Mustillo 2008). Mechanisms have been proposed and introduced in the US, such as the Pew Elections Performance Index, based on Heather Gerken’s concept of a Democracy Index (2009a) (but hereto not been evaluated). These recent inroads have marked important progress. However, studies on how elections are implemented have usually been isolated national cases and there has been no cross-national monograph on electoral management.

1.3 Clarifying the terminology

Such an oversight is remarkable because there is an established set of theories and concepts that have been used to subject the quality of other government services, such as schools, hospitals, and social care, to continuous critical review. An inter-disciplinary approach can therefore be taken to the management of elections. Taking electoral studies into other disciplines requires some conceptual tidying, however, because the terms ‘electoral governance’, ‘management’, ‘administration’ and ‘regulation’ are often used interchangeably or are not differentiated from each other.¹ Scholars from public administration also attach different meanings to concepts such as ‘governance’ – and have even criticised themselves for giving terms multiple meanings.²

Electoral governance is defined here as the broader set of power relationships and actors involved in deciding how elections are organised. The power relations involved in electoral governance cover all aspects of the electoral cycle – from designing an electoral system, electoral justice or polling station design. Electoral governance is therefore about more than electoral management bodies (EMBs) because there is a wider set of actors who will seek to shape the electoral rules of the game. Electoral governance involves rule-making – making decisions about which electoral institution designs to adopt. Rule-making can involve proactive rational decision making, but more often involves institutional drift, layering and conversion (Mahoney and Thelan 2010). The drivers for continuity and change in electoral systems (Blais 2008; Renwick 2010) or other electoral practices (James 2012; Massicotte, Blais, and Yoshinaka 2004; Norris and van Es 2016) have been studied elsewhere. Electoral administration is just one set of electoral institutions subject to rule-making – the procedures used to allow citizens to register and cast their votes (James 2010a).

After rule-making comes rule implementation. Laws and procedures have been made by Parliaments and executives; the role of electoral management bodies (EMBs) and other actors is to apply them. Electoral justice is the final stage of the process. This refers to the mechanisms through which electoral disputes are resolved. This dimension therefore usually takes place in judicial venues (Hernández-Huerta 2017; Orozco-Henríquez 2010).

1.4 Implementation involves rule-making and governance

The focus of this book is electoral management – the implementation of elections. However, implementation also involves elements of rule-making and electoral governance too. This claim deserves some further expansion.

Firstly, designing implementation infrastructures brings rule-making questions. Decisions need to be made about who is responsible for implementing elections – should it be one agency, two or more? What role should there be for civil society? Should the agencies involved be independent of political parties and government ministers – or under their control? Each of these decisions is likely to have consequences for the quality of the election (James et al. 2019a).

Secondly, implementation can involve decision making. There is likely to be considerable discretion afforded to middle-level managers in picking an accessible polling station, resourcing the polling stations and motivating their workforce. As theories from public administration show, front-line local officials and managers are involved in everyday decision making in running elections (Lipsky 1980). They may need to interpret hand-written voter registration applications, deal with queues that arise at polling stations and manage conflictual situations in polling stations. The way that they deal with the everyday voter matters. A basic continuum can be envisaged from being friendly and pointing out all services available, to being rude, aggressive and perhaps not even replying to an email or call which can make a vital difference to a citizen.

Thirdly, administrative bodies such as EMBs are also strategic and political actors. Legislators do not make laws on elections alone. As this book shows, electoral administrators can themselves be highly mobilised actors seeking to lobby and affect the policy process. Although this is not always the case, electoral officials in many countries lack organisation – this is itself significant. At the same time, it is common for more than one organisation to be responsible for organising an election. There are commonly many organisations working together. This leads to opportunities for positive-sum collaborative forms of implementation and governance. But less optimistically, it can lead to inter-organisational politics, rivalries and disputes. In these systems, each EMB has strategies, tactics and tools that they can deploy. In short, they are embedded into resource-dependent governance structures in which their powers and futures are dependent on the strategies they take.

Electoral management is therefore not a simple and narrow process which should be left for practitioners to consider or consigned to dusty bookshelves as it has been. As James et al. (2019a) set out, it involves:

• Organizing the actual electoral process (ranging from pre-election registration and campaigning, to the actual voting on election day, to post-election vote counting).
• Monitoring electoral conduct throughout the electoral process (i.e. monitoring the political party/candidates’ campaigns and media in the lead-up to elections, enforcing regulations regarding voter and party eligibility, campaign finance, campaign and media conduct, vote count and tallying procedures etc.).
• Certifying election results by declaring electoral outcomes.

But, in turn, these tasks require states to ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Part I Foundations
• Part II Performance
• Part III Networks
• Part IV Instruments
• Part V Looking forward
• Bibliography
• Appendix: EMB budget sizes
• Index