Postal Voting under COVID-19: New Challenges-Old Solutions?

Posting voting is a well-established special voting arrangement (SVA) in many countries. It is generally facilitated by sending a voter a blank ballot paper through the national postal service. The voter then completes the ballot and returns it before a defined deadline through the national postal service. While postal voting offers benefits in terms of convenience to the voter, its facilitation requires a safe and reliable national postal service and carefully defined procedures against voter fraud. Under the COVID-19 pandemic, postal voting is one of the SVAs used, adopted and upscaled by election management bodies (EMBs).

This roundtable meeting brings together electoral practitioners to foster knowledge exchange on the legal and procedural frameworks for postal voting. Comparative data and analysis of key practices and issues, will be discussed. This will be complemented by first-hand experiences from EMBs. A summary report will be made available to the public.

This is the first of a series of webinars that International IDEA and the Association of European Election Officials (ACEEEO) are organizing to address questions raised by decision-makers and electoral assistance on the use, adaptation and scaling up of  SVAs under a short time frame while ensuring robust and transparent processes that ensure elections are inclusive and accessible to all voters.   

Format and participation

This is an online meeting among representatives of European EMBs and elections experts. An overview comparative presentation by International IDEA will kick off the discussion followed by presentations of experiences—successes and challenges—by representatives of EMBs from Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Thereafter, an open discussion on reflections, lessons learned and policy recommendations among the participants will ensue.