How electoral management bodies govern digital electoral systems: capacity, authority, and accountability

Abstract

Digital technologies now shape electoral administration across voter registration, candidate management, voting, results transmission, auditing, and public communication. Their performance, however, does not by itself determine who has authority to operate a system, inspect electoral evidence, correct errors, or account for failure. Existing research has identified important capacities within electoral management bodies, but it says less about how those capacities are used in particular electoral procedures. Conceptual analysis was used to clarify the relationship between organizational capacity, institutional action, governance conditions, contextual pressures, risk dynamics, and broader democratic consequences. Ten capacity domains identified in an earlier systematic review were regrouped according to their main institutional functions. Four capacity configurations emerged from the reconstruction: operational, information-assurance, institutional-authority, and relational-governance capacity. These capacities are used through seven institutional processes—authorization, standardization, coordination, safeguarding, verification, correction, and disclosure. Their use may support eight observable governance conditions: institutional control, procedural assurance, verifiability, correctability, contestability, operational resilience, public intelligibility, and institutional answerability. Institutional learning is treated separately as a feedback process through which documented experience leads to changes in later capacity and practice. The proposed framework helps distinguish four sources of institutional weakness: insufficient capacity, failure to mobilize available capacity, failure to establish adequate governance conditions, and constraints that lie partly outside an electoral management body’s control. Its main value is diagnostic and comparative rather than causal. Electoral integrity, credibility, trust, legitimacy, and acceptance of results remain broader consequences influenced by political and informational conditions.