Limitations of the System
Murray and Peter acknowledge that the design of the system has been compromised by legislative requirements. Whilst the system offers the capability for electronic capture of data from input systems, real time updates and the elimination of paper stores of the signed registration forms, in practice the requirement for physical signature verification and storage means that in the meantime the two-stage pre-populated form process must continue. Although the Centre is exempt from the proposed Electronic Transactions Act, and the E-Government authentication bill will allow the use of electronic signatures making it possible to have fully electronic capture and verification of enrolment data (with the attendant reductions in cost of paper processing and mailing), the provisions of the Privacy Act imposes limitations that prevent the EEC from reducing costs and further increasing register accuracy. The Privacy Act, which controls the use of personal information, requires that information transferred across government agencies cannot be updated using real-time database techniques. Thus, although the "front office" activities can be quickly, cheaply and effectively maintained using state of the art technologies, the quality of the information on the databases is compromised by the forced legislative lag. Legislation is thus trailing the capabilities of technology, making it difficult for the Centre to extract the full range of innovative potential that ICTs offer.
Process Requirements
The principal limitations faced by the EEC management relate primarily to policy, legislation and process "brakes" placed upon the speed with which they can implement changes. Whilst delays in the implementation of the Electronic Transactions Act and the E-Government processes and the provisions of the Privacy Act have already been identified as problematical, Murray Wicks and Peter Kelly also believe that a lack of understanding amongst policy-makers of the ways in which the Centre uses information has led to legislative process requirements that are unnecessarily increasing the costs of operating the Registry and reducing its accuracy below what they believe their systems can achieve.
For example, paperless registration is feasible using web- and email-based communication. Whereas the Singaporean government has mandated a move to a compulsory electronic enrolment system as part of the state's e-government initiative, in New Zealand multiple systems must be maintained to ensure that all citizens can attend to registration processes in ways that they choose. This imposes process duplication costs on the EEC (e.g. forms and web page). Until changes are made to the Electoral Act, the Centre is also required to maintain the paper forms as the principal item of record, even though an electronic audit trail could serve the same purpose. This criterion consequently imposes a significant printing, postage (twice for each change) and paper storage and retrieval cost upon the Centre, and increases the time taken to update the master records, at an accuracy cost to clients using output data, which could be eliminated for those citizens who were happy to use a web-based system. As it stands, there is very little effective cost reduction from the web-based system, as each entry results in the production of a form, the processing of which contributes the greatest cost. This same criterion even limits the ability for the Centre to use electronic replication of forms (e.g. scan, microfiche). Although paper storage is cheap, retrieval of the data is costly. Electronic means of storage would make a significant difference to the costs of retrieval of forms for verification and audit purposes.
Likewise, although the Electoral Enrolment Centre has access to other government databases for data matching, the Privacy Act limits the use of this function to one-off events that use update dates to match the most recent data. Technology has allowed a proactive data gathering function through identifying active addresses on the current database system but it does not allow dynamic updates through other agencies.
Unless these issues are addressed, no matter how willing the citizenry is to adopt new ways of updating electoral data, inefficiencies remain.
Back to Top