Clarence Kipobota draws on his experience working on pre- and post-election issues at the Legal and Human Rights Center to address various aspects of Tanzania’s electoral process.  He highlights problems with the independence of the Electoral Committee, updating the permanent voter registry, ensuring the enfranchisement of marginalized groups and combating voter fraud.  He also details how the center and its partners were pushing for reform, and he discusses the voter-education activities they were leading.

Alex Paila discusses various aspects of national and local election management in Sierra Leone during 2007 and 2008. These areas include the recruitment, training, evaluation and monitoring of election staff; election security; voter registration, audits and curtailment of voter fraud; information dissemination, media relations and enfranchisement of marginalized groups; and financial and logistical constraints and concerns.  He also emphasizes cooperation with community-based civilian organizations as key for information dissemination and higher voter turnouts, and he stresses relations with international organizations to improve workers’ training and monitoring, and secure funding. Paila also speaks about the issues of districting and determining electoral timetables.  Finally, he reflects upon some of the challenges faced by Sierra Leone during the elections in 2007 and 2008, as well as possible hurdles that the country may face in the future.    

Zahurul Alam discusses the role of the Election Working Group—a coalition of 33 nongovernmental organizations—in voter registration, voter education, and election observation in Bangladesh. He begins by discussing recent events in Bangladeshi politics, including the boycott of most political parties of the 2007 elections and the imposition of a state of emergency. He speaks about other challenges to fair elections, especially the existence of 15 million false entries in the voters list. The working group and the Bangladesh Election Commission together created a new voters list. He elaborates on the efforts of the working group to mobilize voters for registration, including voter education, advertising and information dissemination, and the organization of rallies across Bangladesh. Alam discusses specific efforts to provide information to rural and minority voters. He further reflects on the organization and management of the working group, and speaks at length about support from the election commission, other NGOs, the media, and the army. Finally, Alam speaks about the subsequent role of the working group in election observation in 2008. 

Case Study:  Energizing the Civil Service: Managing at the Top 2, Bangladesh, 2006-2011

Shahadat Hossain Chowdhury explains the process by which the Bangladesh Army created an electronic voter registration process and electronic electoral roll with photographs. The Electoral Commission chose the Army for this task out of various national and international organizations who submitted offers. He describes several capabilities that the Army brought to the task, including several officers with information technology (IT) skills and the ability, with the Navy and Coast Guard, to reach geographically remote communities. One challenge he identifies was finding and training staff with the necessary IT skills and acquiring the necessary technological resources, such as laptops, cameras, and finger print scanners. To address this need within a short time frame, he explains that the army sought out a number of vendors and occasionally accepted assistance from United Nations Development Project (UNDP). Chowdhury describes how the Army developed software to collect the voters’ information and identify multiple registrations by maintaining the registry. He explains the verification processes for the voter registry, including local government authentication of data and review by the Department for International Development (DFID) and UNDP.