Actually, and as also pointed out by Monica Celliopointed out by Monica Cellio, auroras are sometimes seen in temperate latitudes on Earth, so are not restricted to high latitudes only (although they tend to be more common there).
Taking Wikipedia at face value, there are a few things that can impact the frequency of occurrence of aurora activity:
- They are more common during periods of high solar activity (with our sun, this peaks in an 11-year cycle)
- They are more common during the spring and autumn. The mechanism behind this is not fully known, but at those times of the year, the interplanetary magnetic field and the Earth's magnetic field lines up.
- The solar wind is stronger from the Sun's poles than from its equator.
If we take these together, you'd want:
- a magnetically very active sun
- good alignment between the planet's and its sun's magnetic fields
- a sun rotating at a strong angle relative to the planetary disk's plane; compare Uranus' rotation
I'm not sure if that would be sufficient to produce auroras as far as to the planet's equator, however.
It's quite worthwhile to also note what David Hammen wrote in an answer over on the Physics SE (my emphasis):
Regarding Mars, that's fairly simple. Mars is too small. Mars's core froze long ago, and if Mars ever did have plate tectonics, that process stopped long ago. The end of plate tectonics stops any outgassing that would otherwise have replenished the atmosphere. The freezing of Mars's core stopped Mars's magnetic field, if it ever had one. That Mars is small means it has a tenuous hold on its atmosphere. The loss of a magnetic field (if it ever had one) would most likely have exaggerated the atmospheric loss, particularly if this happened when the Sun was young and had a much greater solar wind than it has now. The combination of the above means that even if Mars was habitable long, long ago, that habitability was rather very short lived.
Also, as quite aptly noted by Monica in her answer, allowing for large amounts of aurora will probably cause problems with anything electrically sensitive. My guess is you'd be looking more at something along the lines of vacuum tube style technology or possibly space-hardened technology, and probably less reliance on electricity and electronics, than the highly minituarized electronics technology that we are used to depending so greatly on (because the latter fares very poorly with large induced voltages and currents, which you would see in such a scenario).
