Phased Elections: Challenges and Strategies to Preserve Integrity in Nonsimultaneous Polls

While most countries reserve one single day for voters across the national territory to cast their ballots, some administer national elections on multiple days. Multi-day voting might mean maintaining polling stations open for a certain period prior to the scheduled election day to allow for early voting_¹ or having different election days or periods for different geographical areas. While some considerations in this brief also apply to early voting settings, its focus is on the latter: phased elections. 

Elections are major logistical endeavors that require substantial resources and personnel mobilization. As the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network explains, the most common rationale for the progressive conduct of elections is “to provide efficiencies where election equipment, logistics capacities, security capabilities, and staff expertise are scarce resources, or where the sheer size of the voting population makes single-day elections difficult to manage.”² Nepalese national security agencies, for instance, have mentioned that phased elections enabled them to “concentrate their effort, deploy permanent professional police, and avoid the investment in time and effort to recruit, train, and deploy temporary police.”³ Phasing elections might also allow electoral management bodies (EMBs) to deploy their most experienced personnel to administer or oversee the electoral processes across the country, facilitating quality control. 

Especially in particularly dire security contexts, domestic forces might struggle to secure all electoral activities across the country. In these scenarios, some governments have decided to phase elections by, for instance, 1) setting up an election calendar with different pre-established polling dates for different regions or municipalities or 2) conditioning electoral events upon defined security benchmarks, moving forward with electoral activities in regions where security indicators reach acceptable levels. However, security is not the only consideration around phased elections, and the complexity of the issue is important to understand as countries consider such an approach in fragile conflict or post-conflict environments. 

While India is the most well-known country that consistently holds national-level elections in multiple phases,⁴ other countries have also implemented this strategy from time to time, such as Nepal,⁵ Pakistan,⁶ Afghanistan,⁷ and Ethiopia.⁸ With conflict and political violence on the rise globally,⁹ more countries might consider phasing elections in an effort to concentrate and optimize resources and personnel on polling days, but decision-makers should be aware that this strategy is also fraught with risks. This brief discusses a series of factors election authorities and other stakeholders should consider before opting for this strategy and recommendations for addressing potential challenges stemming from multi-day voting.

Phased elections refer to polling that is conducted in multiple phases or stages rather than at the same time. They are often also referred to as “multi-staged,” “sequential,” or “staggered” elections, although the latter is also commonly used in reference to systems in which only a portion of the seats for a specific body are being contested at a time, leading to staggered tenures. To avoid confusion, this brief refers to polls for the same race that occur on different days in different regions as phased elections. 

The main international conventions and global standards for democratic elections do not address the phased-elections approach specifically – neither to condemn nor endorse it. However, several documents do specify principles and requirements that elections must meet to be democratic, regardless of how many phases it takes to implement them. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), for instance, provides that every citizen should have the right to freedom of association with others and the right and opportunity to be elected at genuine, periodic elections.¹⁰ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), in its Article 21, provides that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government [and] this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by equivalent free voting procedures.” While these standards and principles face risks in any election, challenges can be heightened when polling takes place on different days. The sections below highlight some of these key challenges to accepted international principles and provide considerations and recommendations for mitigating them, where feasible.