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.    

Douglas Bain discusses his role as chief electoral officer with the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland.  Bain talks about several methods he instituted to bolster trust and confidence in the Electoral Office, including having his staff mask as voters and approach staff at local election offices in order to test the local staff’s responsiveness to a variety of questions and requests.  Bain also discusses his efforts to ensure the accuracy of voter registration forms to defend against voter fraud. Looking to future elections, he suggests greater transparency in the voting process can be accomplished through increased public outreach by election officials.  Bain also stresses the need for greater efforts to combat voter intimidation by the political parties.

Case Study: Breaking the Cycle of Violence: Elections in Northern Ireland, 2005

Albert Kofi Arhin discusses the biggest challenges of conducting elections in Ghana. He details the process of drawing up a timetable for the elections. He explains the issues surrounding elections funding and the steps Ghana is taking to make them more affordable. Arhin also discusses staff recruiting and training, elections monitoring, boundary delimitation, and voter registration. He then focuses on fraud prevention, both in the registration process and during the elections themselves, and security issues.  Arhin also touches on the Electoral Commission’s relationship with the media, discusses voter education, and offers advice for other countries conducting difficult elections.    

Case Study:  Keeping the Peace in a Tense Election: Ghana, 2008

Professor Chaligha discusses the management of elections by the National Electoral Commission (NEC) in mainland Tanzania and the Zanzibar Electoral Commission (ZEC) in Zanzibar. The NEC is responsible for registering voters, demarcating constituencies, and conducting voter education. The relationship between the NEC and ZEC is complex in that some Zanzibar residents, who have spent less than three years in Zanzibar, are registered for mainland Tanzania’s elections. Chaligha mentions NEC’s efforts to maintain transparency on election day. For example, all candidates are allowed to place an election monitor at the polling station during voting. Following Tanzania’s constitution, leaders of political parties – including members of Parliament, councilors and ministers – are not permitted to serve on the NEC. In contrast to the NEC, the ZEC does permit political party members on the commission. A major hindrance to the NEC is its reliance on the government for funding. Chaligha proposes an election fund that the commission could call on only for elections.     

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.