Elections and Special Voting Arrangements

Abstract

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has had a disruptive effect on elections worldwide. Faced with health risks that a mass event such as an election poses, national decision-makers have had to make two major choices: whether to hold elections as scheduled or postpone them, and whether and how to modify the way elections are conducted. With regard to the second question, both policy and academic debates have focused on the introduction and expansion of special voting arrangements, including early, postal, proxy and remote internet voting, as well as the availability of the mobile ballot box. This chapter examines policy responses to the pandemic in the realm of election management in 27 member states of the European Union (EU), focusing on decisions to hold, postpone and modify elections. We find that 15 out of 60 scheduled national, regional and local elections were delayed in EU-27 over the first two years of the pandemic, with the length of the delay varying from seven weeks to nearly half a year. Most of the postponed events were local elections scheduled for the spring of 2020. In nationwide elections held amid the health crisis, voter turnout fell by 2.9 percentage points on average. We also find extensive differences among EU countries in terms of the use of special voting arrangements (SVAs). While 16 countries introduced new SVAs or expanded existing ones during the first two years of the pandemic, the modifications were, overall, limited in scope, attesting to the complexities of changing electoral legislation and practices over a short period of time. While the question of how to conduct elections amid the pandemic gave rise to heated debates in many EU countries, the controversies were most pronounced—and contributed to democratic backsliding—in settings where democracy had been eroding already before the health crisis.