Voter registration: dysfunctions and new prospects

Abstract

Voter registration was one of the issues that leapt into the political debate during the discussion of the implementation of referendum procedures for the first time in Portugal in 1998. The predominance in the discussion of a procedure that is essentially administrative, although it has an impact on the political system, was mainly due to the recognition of the fact that voter registration involved growing errors and that, if they were not corrected, they would jeopardise the validity of the referenda. The basic underlying issue is that of the expansion of the electoral universe due to errors in the voter registration process and the resulting importance of the «technical abstention» phenomenon. In this article, we examine the problem, identify its causes and present proposed solutions to correct the system.