Youth Voter Registration Costs & Challenges in Paraguay

This study follows naturally from the research carried out under the leadership of INTPA G1 on electoral procurement costs during 2021-2022. The earlier publications marked the EU’s first comprehensive methodological effort to shed light on one of the most elusive yet crucial aspects of technical assistance: electoral procurement.

The EDGE Foundation, in line with its mandate as an electoral knowledge facilitator and capacity builder, sought to bridge these initial efforts with the Women and Youth in Democracy (WYDE) – Civic Engagement project, which focuses on strengthening youth participation in the electoral process.

Voter registration remains the most costly, time-consuming and contentious component of many electoral processes. For young people in particular, it is often the main structural obstacle to meaningful participation in elections and public life. Shedding light on voter registration practices and the specific challenges faced by youth is, therefore, a necessary step toward removing entry barriers. Ensuring that every young person is on the voter register is an important democratic objective in its own right  – not merely stage one of improving youth turnout on election day.

To this purpose, we selected 12 cases studies from around the world where a CSO group with a strong youth empowerment vocation could investigate and document existing initiatives and practices to eliminate or mitigate youth participation barriers, while at the same time promoting voting rights for youth and measure their overall impact on voter registration costs. The cases were selected to cover the following criteria:  a) recent voter registration exercises in contexts with a large youth population, b) cases of passive voter registration systems (civil registry-based voter registration), c) cases of active voter registration systems ( ad hoc voter registration), d) cases of transition from active to passive voter registration; e) cases with increasing technology applications in voter registration processes and f) cases where legislative efforts have been made to lower the voting age criteria and increase youth vote.

This journey has taken us to highlight together with our partners measures and methods with which traditional barriers to voter registration have been addressed in very different geo-political contexts, to recognize measures that are generally effective to enhance youth inclusion and to detail the aspects of voter registration that have a significant impact on youth participation (systems, distance of targeted population from registration centers, modalities, fees, information campaigns, placement of registration centers, technology involved, biometric measures required.

Read the first case study on Paraguya here