Technology can be used to assist an election management body (EMB) to process and verify candidates' nominations.
In many countries, a candidate has to be nominated by a specified number of registered voters or by a specified office holder of a registered political party. An EMB can verify that a candidate's nomination has met the relevant criteria by using technology to assist in analysing the candidate's nomination.
In some cases, it may be necessary to record electronically the details submitted with a candidate's nomination or to request the candidate and/or the nominators to supply the data electronically. An EMB could assist with this process by distributing—via disk, email or the Internet—software that is programmed with the necessary forms for the data to be entered into.
Where data needs to be electronically captured but the candidate and/or the nominators are unable to supply electronic data, hard copy nominations are usually supplied. These can be digitalised either through data-entry into the appropriate software or by scanning the lists using an optical scanner equipped with intelligent character recognition software.
Once data has been digitalised, a database management system, a spreadsheet or other customised software may be used to process the nominations. The software can also be used to generate reports or mail merge letters as needed (using also a word processor or a report writer).
If details on nomination forms have to be verified, such as whether candidates or nominators are registered voters, or whether a person shown as a party official is appropriately registered for the purpose, relevant databases or spreadsheets can be consulted.
Technology can be also be used to verify signatures shown on nomination forms. EMBs can assist in this process if they have access to a digitised record of voter signatures (such as a digitised voter register or national identity database where that data is recorded). For relatively small numbers of signatures, an operator would be able to manually compare signatures on nomination forms with signatures on digitised records displayed on screen or printed out. Where large numbers of signatures need to be checked, signature recognition technology might be used to verify that the identities submitted are genuine.
Once all nominations have been accepted, their details are usually required to be made public; digitalisation of nomination information can expedite public disclosure.
There are additional advantages for EMBs to digitalise the candidates’ nomination data. Once this data is stored in a database management system, for instance, it can be linked to other systems that require the same data, such as those used in ballot paper production, election results tallying, public notification and voting place management.
When nomination data has to be made publicly available, this can be achieved by providing information in both hardcopy and in electronic format, including the Internet if available. In this case, it may be useful to have the Internet copy of the nominations data linked to the nominations database to ensure the automatic updating of the Internet version.
election candidate nomination system