 Good morning. Today, we're going to do a question-and-answer session, and we're going to focus on the topic of the financing of elections. We'll mix in some other things, but it's an election management perspective or focus, and we're today in Old Parliament House in Canberra in Australia. My name is Therese Pierce Laudella. I'm the head of the election processes team in International Idea, based in Stockholm. And with me, I have Michael Maley, who has worked with elections for many, many years, initially in Australia, but then internationally, I guess for the past... Well, it will be since 1989 that you've worked internationally. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. And together, we've worked often, starting in Cambodia in 1992. So we've been doing this for a while, but I've always looked to you as a mentor. So it's a real privilege to be with you talking about these issues today. And we hope to convince anybody who's watching that financing of elections is actually a fascinating topic and a really important one. And beyond the interest of election management, but perhaps important for societies in general and where societies are going. So we'll unpack this as best we can moving forward. Rolling. Great. So we have eight questions that will guide our discussion today. And these questions follow in the pattern that is being set by the bridge module on the financing of elections. But today, I think we can talk about it both generically, but also don't hesitate to bring in personal experience or anecdotes and so forth. So the idea with these videos is that it's practitioner focused. And so to get an idea of what, yes, there are ideal types, but what is it like in reality? So don't hesitate to bring in any war stories or anything like that. And because I'm not a professional interviewer of any kind, I might interject with my own opinions or thoughts throughout. So we'll just have a conversation. Does that sound okay? Right. Okay, great. So the first question is, really, why do elections cost so much? Do you mind if I put forward a few categories of possibilities? Sure. And see if you agree with me on these ones, because I have a feeling you'll have more. But when I was thinking about this one, I was thinking of three things, three kind of categories. And one is just the scope and the geography of an election. That, to me, just already denotes the kind of cost that we might be thinking of. If we think of an Indonesia with the islands, for example, or we think of areas with mountains, and then suddenly in our minds we can picture how there could be costs. The other thing that comes to mind for me is timing, and that those brutal deadlines can have cost implications, especially when people who are selling you things, suppliers of materials, know that you are under intense pressure. And the third thing that comes to mind when I think why costs are so high are security features and risk mitigation, just that nothing is allowed to go wrong. Do those three categories sound right, or have I missed an important one? I think those are very important, and I take one step back from those. Okay. And note that the fundamental driver of the high cost of elections is that election administrators are driven by a principle of universality. The whole notion of participatory elections implies that everybody has an equal opportunity to take part in the governance of their country. And this is a concept that goes right back to very fundamental documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on the Civil and Political Rights. Once you've got to that obligation on the administrators to make the facilities to vote or to register to vote available to everybody, that then points to the need for massive field operations, whether that's creating or updating a voter register or running polling on the day, which fundamentally are what the job entails. And you cannot set up polling stations at a relatively small number of places and expect people to come to you like the census in Bethlehem. You have to go out to the people and provide those facilities wherever they are. So it's a big field of operation. I'm just thinking about this point of universality that you mentioned. And I'm just wondering if we can tease out a little bit more of the cost implications of that universality. Because if any given country will have people that are easier to reach than others. So I'm guessing that there'd be a big differentiation and that there'd be some kind of easy, normal, what would be the words that we could use, some kind of standard median voter who would be relatively easy to reach with normal means of communication, transport and so forth. But that there might be other categories which get increasingly expensive and yet you have a mandate to include them. What would you imagine about the cost implications of the different categories of people that might be? Well that's very much so because in organising an election you have to take the geographical dispersal of your population as you find it. You cannot control that. So in an urban environment it's much easier to expect people to travel a reasonable distance to get to a polling station. And a polling station set up in that environment is likely to have a large number of voters within its feeder area. Which means that it's relatively cost effective to provide those facilities. But you also have to deal with rural areas where the population is much more sparsely situated. And to add to that it's worth bearing in mind that there are often political differences in support patterns in urban and rural areas. So if you fail to provide as good a service where people are dispersed as where they're concentrated you may well wind up not only depriving some voters of the opportunity to participate in the governance of their country. But you also may be biasing the electoral process towards one side of politics rather than another. Which means that neutrality is also a fundamental value that has to be brought in here. So you're saying that there are actually political implications of how seriously you take this mandate of universality and your ability to deliver services. That is absolutely so. And in fact in every aspect of the administration of elections there are potential political implications. It's hard to imagine one that doesn't fall into that category. And when you look at the scale of the operation that's involved and a metaphor which I've often used is that of trying to run a vaccination campaign in the country. If you think about what it would require to vaccinate the entire adult population of a country against Sao Paulo on one day. You get a sense of the degree of organisation and the degree of resources that are needed to run an election. The only thing that's different is the product. You are giving people a ballot paper rather than a jab in the arm. There's another difference which is with the jab in the arm you don't need to retrieve the materials to the capital city within the same evening. The way that with an election you're expected to retrieve results from very remote places to the capital city and compile them within the same evening. So perhaps it's even more difficult than a vaccination campaign. That's very true. No that's very interesting. I'm just thinking again just one more thing. We've talked about the differences between just say rural voters and urban voters and there may be cost implications. But there are other segments of the population not geographical but those who for whatever reason don't turn out. Now here in Australia you have compulsory voting. There are many countries that don't and some places voter turnout is getting as low as 40 or 50 percent. So what cost implications are there for the populations that aren't participating? Are there cost implications for reaching them? That's going to depend very much on what are the reasons why people aren't participating. One of the specific obstacles that may have to be overcome to ensure that they can still participate even if the standard simplest model of going to a polling station isn't fitted to these circumstances. And that then takes you into having to deal with almost the entire range of possible human experiences from people who lack mobility which may be because of some sort of disability or because of old age. You may have people who are illiterate and unable to absorb so easily public information messages about where they have to go to vote. You may have people who are incarcerated in prison or that are still entitled to vote. You may have people who are in hospitals. And increasingly you are finding that people who are outside the boundaries of their own country constitute a larger and larger proportion of the overall population and often they will have constitutionally guaranteed rights to participate in the electoral process which means that the geography is not just a matter of that within the country but possibly the provision of voting services throughout the world. I think you're exactly right that people's identities are much more fluid these days and migration is a big part of that story and this has implications for how elections will be run in the future because election administration, one fundamental part of it is assigning people to a constituency and now that we've got these fluid identities increasingly, what constituencies do people fit too? And that brings me to two kind of follow on questions which have to do with the ideal type versus the reality when it hits the ground and let me ask both and I'll let you pick one or other to respond to. The first is if we have these constituencies of people of our population of citizens that are increasingly difficult to reach so for whatever reasons you talked about perhaps being broad or for whatever reason perhaps being marginalized from society or being in a very remote area. I'm reminded of the decisions that have to be made in health care. I think there may be some parallels. In health care there are certain diseases which are much more prevalent say diabetes for example and so it makes sense to put a lot of resources there and there's no question about that but then there are diseases that are increasingly fewer and fewer and fewer people and at some point and this is very very difficult in the health care profession is at some point there has to be a cut off because money is only enough. So where do you spend the money? Do you think that's something that election management bodies have to deal with which is at some point you have to decide who you are going to target for inclusion in this electoral process and let me add a second question which is similar to that which is the delivery of service to different constituencies just say they're abroad or in institutions or all the different varieties which you said they might need a special type of service which is different from the normal one which we would expect which is the polling station and being registered to your polling station for example so this might mean provisional voting or proxy voting or it might mean mail voting or institutional voting or mobile voting or out of country voting and this adds layers of complexity Could you reflect a little bit about future directions and what does this complexity mean for cost and also my question about are there realistic trade-offs that need to be made and how do we make those trade-offs recognising that there are financial implications Well unpacking that one would have to say that the finiteness of resources be they financial resources or human resources is a fact of life and it always will be in any sort of administrative environment where elections are being run so every collection administrator I think starts with the ambition of trying to provide the best possible service to every conceivable voter and that is the right approach to take because you're talking about people's human rights here and you might say well we got to 99% of the population but for the 1% that you didn't reach you have taken from them 100% of their vote of their influence over the political situation of the country so it's a very challenging decision to have to make and almost invariably what it needs is very much micro level planning to understand the circumstances of the sorts of individuals you're dealing with or categories of voters you're dealing with or the geographical level the territory that you are dealing with to try to make sure that even if you can't give everybody an equally easy way of voting at least you can give everyone a reasonable opportunity to vote which reflects their own capacities just as we say that voting is supposed to be free that doesn't mean that I have to put petrol in my car to drive to a polling station that the voters no longer free even though it imposes a cost to me there are reasonable expectations one can have all voters that they will get to the polling stations for example but you do have to be very much focused on those who have insuperable difficulties in exercising the franchise and drawing that balance is a very delicate thing because you're dealing with a large number of individuals and you can't actually know about every individual how they are placed all you can do is give it your best shot and if you do that usually the community is prepared to accept that but you do have to be very much alert to feedback you are getting from the community as to whether there are particular problems associated with plans or budgets that you put together such that identifiable groups of people are going to miss out yeah that's a really good point and I think we should move to planning in a moment I just wanted to mention just reiterate one of the points that you made which was about this feedback and one thing that we found in a study at one point was that if you do stakeholder consultations if you talk to people who represent constituencies and have really robust conversations they actually have quite creative solutions often which may not be that costly and yet those conversations sometimes aren't had so it is very much worthwhile to have those discussions as early as possible and this idea of as early as possible brings me to the topic of planning which I know you feel strongly is linked with the issue of financing because if we do have an increasingly complex way of delivering services then in order to not make any mistakes planning has to be very good what do you think is the linkage between planning and financing? well you can't really do any election financing unless you know what it is that you are planning to do and that's what planning is fundamentally about it is knowing what you are going to be doing to do it properly you really have to understand what the polling operation what the registration operation what the counting operation is going to look like and to understand that you need to know what are the legal requirements you need to have a sensitivity to what are the political expectations surrounding the operation that you're doing and you need to have a sense of what the community would like because it's important to bear in mind that an election is fundamentally a political exercise and the definition at the most basic level of a successful election is one where everybody accepts the result so that legitimacy is conferred on whatever it is you're electing be it a president, be it a government, a parliament or whatever and so that you don't have a breakdown into civil disorder because people don't see the election as a legitimate way of making societal decisions so you can never take your eye off that political requirement and sometimes just obeying the law is not enough you do have to make sure that that imperative of delivering something that everyone lives with can as best as possible be met Does that have what you've just said now bringing in the legitimacy aspect or this political dimension? I wonder if that, of course, not I wonder how can we think about the difference in terms of financing so let me give you two concepts and how might we think about financing elections differently when we think of them and concept one is the mandate to deliver a result so really everything that you're doing is to deliver an accurate result whether it's the voter registration, the voter information the logistics around polling and the counting process and so forth or to take your next point which was an accepted result so a result that is seen as legitimate if we frame things as a result which is more perhaps transactional, operational versus an accepted result which brings in these other aspects of the legitimacy of the process and how people perceive it you've said just now that the accepted result is the deliverable that you need to give are there any financial, are there any differences between how to think about costing, financing, costing and financing an election between those two are there extra things or different things that you would need to pay for for that legitimacy or for that accepted results for people to believe in the results are there other things you might need to invest in besides the more logistical elements? Yeah and it's very much context dependent on what's happening in a particular country and that in turn may be influenced by the past history of elections in a country to give but one example the result of the election may be objectively accurate but to get the broad acceptance of that result that you want you may well have to deliver those results not just accurately but very quickly and delays in the finalization of election results in many countries have been associated with perceptions of manipulation of the process so many countries have made major investments in computerised results compilation systems the aim of which essentially is to speed up the processing of results and to enable more detailed, finely structured data right down to the polling station level to be provided expeditiously to the community with the view to providing a greater transparency of the whole process now in a lot of places that is a matter of fundamental political importance even if it's not specified in the law it's very difficult to say what is a legitimate amount of money to spend on those sorts of systems because essentially you're buying trust and trust is not a commodity for which there is a price tag that varies, that doesn't vary from country to country so that can be another factor which pushes up the cost of elections when you are not just paying for the mechanics of the process but you are paying for particular mechanical elements that are designed fundamentally to enhance credibility and trust rather than simply achieve some of the more operational objectives so you brought up the linkage between quicker results and trust and the possible cost implications of those now while we are on the topic of trust one thing that we know is that trust is built in interactions and for citizens or for candidates many of the interactions are with either polling station officials or voter registration officials or for candidates it could be with staff at the election management body and so forth in those transactions what do you think builds trust and are there cost implications in terms of what you would invest in to have those interactions be positive for the community and to give them faith that the election management body is working as it should I think it's going to vary depending on the different interactions and it will depend on their complexity and the degree to which officials, either polling officials or election management body officials are involved in exercising discretion as distinct from simply implementing rules now if you are simply implementing rules you can build up trust by making it clear what the rules are and publicising that well before the process if it's a matter of exercising discretion my personal view is that the most powerful tool in building trust is being prepared to explain your reasons for having arrived at a particular decision and you cannot as an election management senior manager simply speak ex-catheter and say I have made my decision and I'm independent so that's my power and I don't have to explain it to you because I'm the boss that doesn't work in my experience people are much more inclined to accept a decision you have made even if it is against their interests if you are prepared to go to the effort of specifying exactly what are the criteria that you took into account when you made that decision what are the legal requirements, what are the facts as you understand them how have you applied those legal requirements to that fact situation and why you have reached a particular conclusion which may be for example to refuse registration to a political party to reject a nomination from a candidate those sorts of delicate decisions transparency is a very powerful tool in those circumstances but again it comes to cost you have to be prepared to invest in preparing detailed statements and reasons you may have to do that for quite a lot of different cases whenever you had the sort of sometimes seen as bureaucratic requirements to go beyond just making decisions but also justifying them in the community you're going to have to pay for it but it's a price that's worth paying because you have to look at the alternative which may well be a boycott of the elections by a particular party or supporters of the candidate so these kinds of transactions that you're talking about these transparent explaining carefully why a decision was made these are being made perhaps at the district level across a country so you need to have people who are capable of having those kinds of interactions who are empowered to do so and who have the competence to do so is if I frame it like this it's I guess an investment in people to have that type of staff who are able to do that either it is investing in retaining high quality staff who are experienced from before or maybe well trained or do you have any sense of the is this something that is expensive or to have to get to a place where you have a well staff who are able to do this I just want to bring up the issue that because elections happen only every three or four years having people with that much experience is not always that they do to be able to behave in the way that you described and I'm thinking also that sometimes in districts there's really only one person that is kept on between elections and sometimes not even that people can be very temporary and certainly at the polling station level it's very temporary staff so do you have any thoughts about what to invest in to bring that many people up to the level of being able to gain the trust of the people that they deal with is training a good investment or is it retaining staff that's the good investment or is it identifying good people to begin with or what and are there cost implications of those choices well I think all of those things are important one of the greatest challenges that we face in the election business is it is a complex operation that you are running and it's not just complex because of its scale but it becomes complex as different voting modalities get added to provide services for a range of different people but paradoxically the better an election is run the easier it looks to outsiders if you have a well run polling station you will come in you will be given your ballot paper your name will be found efficiently on a list or a database you'll be in and out relatively quickly and it's easy to underestimate just how much work has gone into making that succeed it's only when you see a complete meltdown of the election that you do get a sense of the risks that election managers on the other side of the table as it were think about in their nightmares so that level of complexity shouldn't be underestimated and all of the tools that you've talked about training, retaining good staff and resourcing good people and keeping them on help to mitigate the risks associated with that complexity but it's a challenge because the policy makers who ultimately are going to be allocating your budgets have seen you doing things smoothly and successfully and often they too don't have an understanding of the complexity of what you are trying to deliver on election day really I guess it's when you see it on the news yes that's no election in the middle of the day it wants to be on the news no exactly so we've mentioned temporary staff as one challenge there's so many staff that need to be hired so quickly and yet they have to do things perfectly as one of the challenges is there anything else that comes to your mind about what makes elections very challenging I think it's a very unforgiving political environment in some countries mostly when you are running an administrative operation you can assume that people want it to succeed whereas in some countries the commitment to democratic processes to democracy as to stick from commitment to your side winning is way for thin and it may well be that the losers in a particular context are just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can use that as a pretext for not accepting the result or putting pressure on you or the government or the head of state or whoever to make concessions to keep them on board so in those circumstances you as an election administrator you don't know how close the election is going to be it is sensible you'll always assume that you're going to have a really close result but in those political challenges are some of them and go one of the great challenges that you can find yourself facing in some contexts is that there are people who want you to fail not every country has politicians all of whom are committed to democratic processes in some situations particularly in past conflict environments that commitment may be way for thin they are happy to support the election as long as they're winning but if they lose their default position becomes looking for any pretext to refuse to accept the result which may mean returning to the bush or it may mean using that as a way of pressuring the head of state for example to accommodate them in some sort of arrangement like a government of national unity so the political moments can be quite mixed and it's a challenging environment to find yourself in as an election management professional no matter how well you do things you can't be guaranteed that the results will be accepted by everybody that's a major political risk this point that you're making has actually come up in one of the UN Secretary General's reports he reports on electoral matters and the point came up that elections are actually reasonably well run or the understanding of how to run elections is certainly there globally very different to when we began many years ago but the biggest challenge is political leadership and finding... gaming the system so whatever election system there is instead of going into it in good faith but finding ways to gain the system and certainly we're finding that that's being felt in very mature democracies who are seeing the system gained in new ways whether it's social media or ways that political campaigns have been run so these are new challenges I think for election administration it's also worth bearing in mind that in certain circumstances additional expenditure might be needed or suggested to find some sort of way effectively in buying trust and examples which have been found in a number of countries where biometric identification or voter registration systems have been proposed essentially to mechanise what otherwise is a human process of determining who is entitled to vote which process presumably is not trusted by some parties for some reason but once you start investing in that sort of technology possibly for marginal and unmeasurable increments of trust the costs can go up dramatically because you are paying for high tech equipment and if you're doing it properly you are also paying for training for maintenance for backup systems if things go wrong and everything that's associated with implementing new technological systems and also future proofing it that is technology that is to be used over time so you need to build systems that will manage it not just for the next election but for the future and as I noted it's very difficult to make an objective judgement on what is a reasonable amount to spend essentially to try to buy trust alright I'm going to ask you now what are sound electoral financial management principles what comes to mind when you think about if you were to look at the health of a particular election management body what would you be looking for? I think one of the first things that is worth bearing in mind when you're talking about financial management is that that in itself is an instrument towards a deeper goal which is the implementation of the election process you aren't running the elections and registration and accounting and the like you don't need money so primacy in all of these considerations has to be given to what are the tasks that you are actually required to do and if you want to get that right you can't really budget for a process unless you understand that process and a lot of these processes are becoming quite intricate now whether we're talking about intricate from a legal point of view or whether we're talking about intricate from a technological point of view somebody who is in the decision making chain and in the planning chain really has to understand in complete detail and see in their minds what the operation is going to look like on the ground now this is not so easy because a lot of us have an impressionistic sense of what a good well-run polling booth looks like but that is not enough for planning and it's not enough for budgeting you need to be able to think through exactly what equipment you need exactly what furniture you need exactly what staff you need and what they're all doing and if you fudge those things if you get it wrong you'll either come up under resourced or wasting money so if those skill sets aren't in one person that is if the person who is working with the finances doesn't have that background knowledge are there hacks are there special ways perhaps working is there any way of learning that if you don't have that experience or is it working with teams or how can the knowledge of the financial systems and the knowledge of the election systems be joined so that they work well together one of the fundamental principles I think of election administration is that everything is connected to everything else and you can't really realistically say I only work on finance I only work on operations or I only work on planning you need to have all of them integrated now ideally everyone will understand everything realistically you're going to have a degree of specialisation where some people know more about finance and some people know more about operations and some people know more about training and so on but you need a way of making sure that the work applies the knowledge of those other areas and in my experience that works best when you have a good project you've got to get people together who collectively have that wisdom and you've got to have time for them to actually share that knowledge it has two benefits one is that you get a better product but you also get a better cohort of people if they are actually in contact with each other and expanding their knowledge of productivity so that's my personal view that it's the best way of operating is to just make sure that everything you do is where you're getting into trouble is where you have people trying to budget who don't understand costing or where you have people trying to do costumes who don't understand the fundamental operation that's being put together so that's relationships and breaking down silos within an organization and I know how easy it is to build it up and I know how easy it is for there to be different cultures perhaps in the finance area versus the voter education area so different cultures can build up and you're saying the importance is to break down those and have an understanding for each others how does this manifest in a good strategic plan and what documentation how does we were talking about people who don't know what's between them and the skill sets but what does the plan and the planning looks like well, strategic planning is one element in that a good election management body will make sure that that sharing of knowledge and an expectation that people will be knowledgeable is reflected in the aims and ethos of the organization but it also needs good leadership because it's too easy for a plan to be seen simply as a document and it's done every three years or something like that and then it gets put on the bottom shelf and nobody looks at it for three years and the detachment between the formal document and the way people actually work is a problem with strategic planning you can get around that by having a more participatory process but fundamentally senior management set expectations within an organization of what people will know and if they allow people to get away with just being in silos and focusing on their own patch that's what they'll do if there is a clear expectation that is articulated from the very top that everyone is expected to do their best to learn the business of the organization it doesn't matter whether they're finance or human resources they still need to know about elections and it doesn't matter if you're an operations person you still have to be sensitive to finance and personnel issues you've got a much better chance of ensuring that over time people are going to build up those levels of knowledge a lot of it is about valuing knowledge and if and also knowing what you don't know and sometimes you find that you just don't have an appreciation of the gaps in their knowledge that's what it works for so just linking that back to cost so financing is contingent on good planning and good planning can be a way of bringing together the knowledge that different people have in the organization just to bring it up one level we've been focusing now on the election management body itself but the election management body isn't that the financing comes from elsewhere so if we just speak about that level now and you've had the privilege of working in a number of places could you tell me something about the modalities of financing from your experience what different modalities exist for financing elections election processes or the human being itself but fundamentally in most situations you have two default situations the first is where the election is paid for from the national budget and that should be the way in which things are done everywhere it's a national running elections is one of the most fundamental elements of the sovereignty of a country and if you regard yourself as a sovereign independent country you ought to be prepared to pay for your own elections you ought to be prepared to pay for your president's salary and the like it's just one of those fundamental costs so whenever I've heard countries that go to donors and say we'd like you to pay 90% of the cost of the elections I've always recalled a little bit but you do get circumstances and this may be where a country is in financial straits possibly in a post-conflict environment where there are things that can only really be provided by donors that actually are making your case not just for your national government they should always contribute but also to players such as the United Nations or European Union or major donor countries or organisations who may be prepared to help you you are typically pitching for different sorts of funding in those sorts of circumstances because external donors will be looking not so much to pay your core costs but to provide you support which can be packaged as development assistance which is going to improve your capacity within an organisation within a country to stand on your own feet in the future and so often the content of what you're looking for is different your country may pay for salaries of staff but merging your systems investment in IT strategies sometimes enhancement training of the like may come from outside fundamentally in both situations what you have to appreciate is that you are dealing with skeptics the skeptics are more often than not disinclined to waste money if you're a national department of finance you don't want to be seeing elements of your government throwing money away because it scares if you are a donor country you are actually accountable to your own citizens for money which is spent on development assistance and if that looks to be wasted or spending efficiently that has political consequences in the donor country and the domestic world and the same is true of international organisations such as the UN or the European Union so in all of those circumstances it is incumbent on you as a lection administrator to be able to justify what you are asking for as well as possible you will be asked searching questions about how you arrived at a particular figure for staffing let's say staffing the polling stations and if you just say well two million dollars sound like a nice round figure we're going to get very far because that's lazy what you should be able to say is we've just determined on the basis of the population distribution requirements that we are going to need X numbers of polling stations in these places and this is the staffing profile that we have for different categories of polling stations and these are the titles we will need and associated with our staff costs we're going to have the DM costs and all sorts of training costs and the like and we've broken it down in all this detail here it is and if you can show that you have really thought through the process that you really understand the process you've got a much better chance of mobilising the funds than it looks as if you've been very slapdash about the whole thing and not take it seriously people who are giving you money expect you to take that process of justifying it to be serious I heard one very experienced election commissioner give advice to a chief electoral officer who was incoming and his advice was know your numbers because the person who was incoming wasn't necessarily didn't have a management background sometimes people are chosen to be the head of an election management body because of their credibility in society they may have a background so this might be a little bit new but apparently know your numbers was a very important piece of advice and that follows the point that you're taking now one you just said national budgets in general but within a national budget there are different modalities and this can be an issue in places where there might be well any place really where there might be political interests how the election management body is funded so a strong election commission who's trying to be independent may annoy politicians and this may have implications for financing depending on how that financing comes through so I know that this is an issue of discussion and concern amongst many election commissioners is the concern that financing becomes something that is politicized and delaying the displacement of the funding is a way of interfering with the independence of election management bodies and in this discussion is what are the best modalities to ensure that that politicization of financing doesn't happen for example is working through parliament a better model or having something that's standing in treasury are there different ways to avoid that possible problem of being notionally independent and yet if your financing doesn't come to you you become de facto beholden to political interests when you look across the broad range of countries there are lots of different ways to deal with that issue but when you're in a particular country there may not be so much flexibility because budgetary processes tend to be specified at what you call a whole government level and all of the government organizations and ministries are constrained to operate within the framework for budgeting which is an existence and that may flow from the constitution it may flow from particular pieces of legislation or maybe guidelines issued by the ministry of finance and various a lot from place to place so you may not in fact have very much flexibility much as you might like to be able to deal directly with the parliament if the budget government budget process requires that the budget be solid up by the government before it's even put to the parliament you can't go looking at the details of budget considerations or you'll get yourself in even deeper trouble so again it comes back to a matter of being as persuasive as you can and as transparent as you can within the constraints that are created by the administrative and the political and legal environment in a particular country and sometimes there's no easy way out if governments and parliaments don't want to fund you they're not going to be able to fund you and you're again your options then depend on your own mandate whether you can speak out publicly whether you can make a case directly to the parliament some in some places you can and other places you can't without breaking the law and you also have to be extremely careful to make sure that any sort of discussion that you get into that type can't be characterised as adopting the political position of one party over another because you then find yourself compromising perhaps the most fundamental value of all the P&P space which is political neutrality I wanted to pick up the people who have worked with elections for a long time they bring up the aspect of time as being in some sense what differentiates elections from many other parts of public administration that there is this strong time dimension and I've noticed that many things that have gone wrong and that have resulted to that have resulted in perhaps problems that have led to results not being expected have had somewhere at their root delays either delays in legislation or delays in procurement I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about this time dimension and the delays aspect as being one aspect of this time discussion but relating it to cost what is the cost of a delay we spoke before about planning and the importance of early planning and I guess delays is the opposite of that but can you relate the cost implications with the difference between planning something early putting things in place versus delays and what would the implications for cost be the implications are really quite multifarious for a number of reasons first if you are doing things at the last minute if you are procuring equipment let's say at the last minute you are likely to have less time to do a proper assessment and testing of different bids if you're going through a tender process you will have less time to do training for people who are going to be using the equipment and suppliers will know that you are running up against an immutable deadline and they can put their price up particularly if they think they're in a good situation to hold you over a barrel as it were so by placing yourself in a situation of running up against immutable deadlines you really weaken your bargaining position because of the commercial market you also greatly increase the risks you are facing with if something goes wrong you won't have time to correct it or if you do you'll have to do so at an enormous last minute cost and this has been an endemic problem with elections around the world over the last 20 or 30 years to a certain extent addressed by a much greater focus on the electricity cycle and since that concept has become a much more focused upon one in the last 10 or 12 years there's more of a realisation that the more things you can get done earlier in the cycle in preparation for your next election the safer you are in terms of risk management the less you will pay in terms of election costs particularly when you are implementing new systems so you can really never start planning too early and start preparing too early one of the worst mistakes I've seen made in some places is to assume that you can't really start doing any planning or preparation until all of the unspecified parameters of the election have been resolved at a critical level so you may feel that until the legislation is in place you can't do anything until proposed legislative amendments have been disposed of one way or another you can't do anything until you have a broad sense of what your budget may be you can't do anything and this becomes an excuse and a recipe for procrastination and this becomes worse you are far better off taking what you know making plausible reasonable assumptions to fill in the gaps in your knowledge at a particular time and start doing plans which you can amend later if you need to but if you are three months out from an election and you haven't done any planning or preparation you are constantly going to be under the gun from then until polling day and you really only need to go about your wrong and you will be completely disrupted in your operation so you can't ever take your eye off time it is always the scarcest commodity I really recognise what you are saying and having lived through this a number of times I really feel for the people at the front lines who end up suffering from mistakes that have been done really not mistakes but delays earlier and I feel that those delays are really putting your front lines in danger in a very unfair way and just on that I would add that you need to always have in mind that it is your front line staff your polling officials who fundamentally are delivering the election you as an electoral commissioner are not you are contributing to it and if you put them in a dire situation because of your own poor planning and preparation they don't have to work on elections very often and you may find that you have compounding problems over a sequence of elections as the credibility of your organisation from an administrative point of view is compromised and people don't want to work for you and if people don't want to work for you you are not going to be able to deliver the product Michael, can you describe an election that demonstrates poor planning that resulted in wasted funds and or harm to the reputation of the election management body and what lessons can be drawn from this? I think I would like to talk a little bit in response to that question about one of the most significant elections of the 20th century which was the 1994 poll in South Africa which led to the end of apartheid and the introduction of multinational democracy and there were some serious planning shortcomings in that election but it's worth emphasising that they weren't really the fault of the election management body because the fundamental problem was one of time the date for the election had actually been specified before the election management body was even created and that choice of date had been made on the basis of a political timeline rather than any analysis of what were the practicalities of putting the operation together the other thing to bear in mind about that election which structured everything that happened was that there was a massive unprecedented increase in the size of the electorate because the majority who had been franchised for the whole of the history of the country were suddenly being enfranchised when you enfranchise the women in a country which is the process many people have gone through you double the size of the electorate essentially in South Africa the size of the electorate was multiplied by a factor of six and that created challenges which were off the scale and was actually run by a newly created independent electoral commission which had to go through the process of setting itself up at the same time as planning for this extremely high profile and significant poll and so it was given an impossible task and what I have to say is not really a criticism of any of the people who were involved but rather an illustration of what can go wrong when the walls are closing in from a number of different directions fundamentally the challenge of putting together all of the tasks that needed to be done wasn't able to be done in a systematic way because by the time the commissioners were appointed everywhere they looked there were high priority tasks that simply had to obviously better be done straight away and so very naturally as human beings they threw themselves at those tasks and there wasn't the time to prepare a really comprehensive plan before the work actually started so it was a classic example of what they call building the voters just trying to sail it and that led to a whole range of different difficulties right through the process one of the ones that was really significant was that the commission became very focused on its operations in the headquarters in Johannesburg and there wasn't quite the consciousness that was needed that fundamentally the election was a field operation which would be having to take place in the smallest villages and towns and cities right through South Africa and I will remember going to Port Elizabeth which is the fifth biggest city in the country three weeks before polling day and visiting the headquarters for the province of the Electoral Commission and there was nothing there except a telephone on the floor and at that point I had a sense that problems were going to arise because everything was simply happening too late and this developed into a process on polling day where serious problems were distribution of materials with availability of staff with choice of polling places as the operation became more and more time constrained there were searches made for high tech ways to perhaps identify potential polling stations using geographic information systems and that gave rise to a lot of problems because communication is always one of the first thing to fall by the wayside when you are under time pressure and there was a famous case where a priest came into his church and found that it was being wired up by the telecom body because it had been chosen to be a polling station and he hadn't been told about it so all of these sorts of problems arose and there was also particularly during the election period there was one example that still sticks in my mind almost 25 years later and that was the counting that was done for the three big central provinces Johannesburg, Pretoria, which all took place at the National Sports Centre in Soweto and somewhere along the way there had been no planning done for the receipt of the materials from the polling stations at that big centre which was going to be millions of ballot papers at the point was reached where 170 utility trucks were backed up the Soweto Highway waiting to drop off their materials somebody panicked and said just bring the stuff in and drop it and of course the ballot boxes got separated from your documentation and it became a total mess that took about a week to sort out before it was even possible to start doing any counting and this was under the gaze of the international press the South African community and so on it's a tribute to the strength of the political settlement which had been reached before the election that this didn't turn into a real crisis fortunately everybody in South Africa wanted the election to succeed and so a lot of these operational problems were papered over with the aim of ensuring that the political process proceeded smoothly but in a different context if you had parties that were disinclined to accept the results or had opposed the entire process it would have been a total catastrophe so there are lessons to be learned very much from South Africa but again one of the most important ones is simply that if you don't have enough time to do what you need to do you basically do it Thank you Michael, if you were asked for advice by a new or reform minded election management body for processes for developing a budget or financial systems what advice would you give? I think the first piece of advice that has to be given is that any budget you develop has to be based on a plan and it has to reflect both the strategic and operational plans of the organisation and those plans have to be of high quality if you have a rough and ready plan which hasn't thought through the detail of what's going to be happening at polling stations at registration points at counting centres and the like your budget will not reflect the needs of the situation on the ground and you're going to run into trouble so budgeting and planning are inextricably linked and need to be in order to put together a good operation and I can't emphasise enough the need for people at all levels of an organisation to actually understand the fine detail of what they are doing of all their legal requirements of all of the mechanics of the process now that's not to say that the senior people have to get involved in designing or implementing those details but they do need to know them because in the election business even the smallest details can have profound significance if anything goes wrong if anything isn't correctly implemented you always have to assume that you're going to be the next florida that you're going to have a very close election and if you have a very close election then the final detail can come into play if there's a core challenge or if there's a political challenge so senior managers really have to get their heads around what is going on at the ground level and the best of the senior electoral managers with whom I've worked really made an effort to understand everything that their organisation was doing and that has so many different benefits a second point I think that's worth bearing in mind in terms of fundamentals is to understand decentralisation elections are fundamentally decentralised operations they have to go out to the people they take place on election day at a vast number of different places and to make that work you need absolute clarity on what authority and responsibility resides at the service level at the district level at the provincial level and at the national level and if there is a lack of clarity on that it affects planning it affects budgeting and it affects implementation and one of the classic sort of problems that I've seen over the years is a failure to reflect sufficiently and sufficiently early is spread throughout the organisation I think another thing that's worth bearing in mind is that the great challenge of the election business is that we only do our work every few years in some countries there may be a five-year gap between one national election and the next this is a huge contrast to many other areas of public administration where people are dealing with cases on a day-to-day basis and therefore knowledge is built up smoothly over a period of time and new people can be introduced to the area and learn from day one whereas if you are in the election business really nothing can compare you as well as working on an election and you may find yourself in a position of considerable responsibility without ever having worked on an election and that is a challenge for knowledge management how do we get people across the detail of what they have to do without having really access to that most basic learning exercise which is learning by doing and this is where planning becomes important because we tend to think of plans as a tool just for implementation but plans are also on knowledge management if you are having to go into an organisation and take part in the planning of the next election the natural thing to do is ask to see the plans from the last election and if they are thoroughly documented if they are comprehensive and they are sensible and easy to find then you have a very good basis on which to start your work for the future and if they are all in someone's head if they are all on scraps of paper spread across different files or even worse if they are spread through a whole lot of emails that have never been systematically put in the one place then you are basically thrashing around trying to start from scratch and that is very very difficult in something as complex as the election process so the very basic bureaucratic functions of having corporate knowledge and sustaining it through records through knowledgeable individuals is fundamental to being able to deliver these intermittent but highly important operations thank you just on that knowledge management topic have you got a thought about what type of knowledge management approach or system at a very basic level would be needed for say a new election management body well one of the most important things is to have good filing and one of the challenges that is being faced by a lot of election management bodies around the world now is the changing form of communication when I first became an election administrator which was back in the 1980s most communication between the organisation and external organisations and most communication between people within the organisation either face to face or on paper and if you had paper, letters, minutes those sorts of documentation you could put it on a paper file and those files would then be accessible to anybody who needed to read them it was a very simple way to operate increasingly with the changing world communication is now taking place electronically and it is terribly easy all of a sudden to communicate massive documents to large numbers of people with the hit of one button and unless you have moved into a really good electronic records management system you simply lose control of what's out there you lose track of what's going on in the worst cases important documents wind up not in any sort of corporate system but on the hard drive of the laptop PC of someone who's gone on holiday at a critical time and taken their laptop with them and I have known this to happen and in that situation you don't really have corporate knowledge you have a whole lot of atomistic bits of individual knowledge with no real way of bringing them together and that is something you may be able to get through for a time but Murphy's law being what it is inevitably that one day is going to lead to disaster and it's probably going to lead to disaster and election time thank you