Major Findings A wide array of analysis has explored the broader implications of COVID-19 and information integrity challenges for democracy. The focus of this brief is to identify the specific implications for the electoral cycle – such as the potential impacts on confidence in electoral results and trust in political and electoral processes and procedures – including during the pre-electoral and post-electoral periods. At the time of this writing, relatively few elections have taken place since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. The findings outlined here draw on lessons learned from how hate speech, misinformation and disinformation have impacted past elections Implications for the Integrity of the Campaign Period As other avenues for campaigning are limited during the pandemic, parties and candidates are likely to increasingly turn to online campaigning and protest to reach voters through social media. Given that regulations on the use of social media in campaign periods are nascent in most countries and that monitoring and oversight of political advertising on social media are limited as well, the opportunities for parties and candidates to abuse these channels of communication may increase as a larger share of campaigning happens online. Varying degrees of oversight means that there are few de jure or de facto restrictions on how much can be spent on political advertising on social media and whether these expenditures need to be reported or will be audited for accuracy. For election authorities or government oversight bodies that currently lack capacity or a mandate to monitor social media and track candidates’ spending on online advertising, it is likely unrealistic that such measures can be implemented in the near term. While public oversight agencies must continue to move forward in their thinking about how to regulate and enforce measures to oversee campaign spending on social media, civil society and investigative journalists should help to fill this gap where appropriate. This task is made more or less difficult by the differing availability of social media transparency tools. The comprehensiveness of tools such as the Facebook Ad Library56 and the Google Transparency Report57 vary among countries, and as resources within social media companies have been redirected toward COVID-19 activities, the expansion of political ad transparency features has also been delayed.58 Social media companies should keep pushing forward on ad transparency as it is even more important during the pandemic. Where these tools are or will soon be available, local actors are not necessarily aware of or using them. Facebook and Google, in partnership with international partners and local stakeholders, should proactively raise awareness about the functionality of these tools and train civil society, journalists and oversight agencies on how to use them, particularly in countries that will soon resume elections. Implications for the Integrity of Electoral Administration and Operations As elections in many countries have been postponed due to COVID-19, legislators are debating if and how to alter election processes to ensure public safety. IFES discusses many of these changes in the first paper of this series on Safeguarding Health in Elections,59 and their legal and constitutional implications in the second paper, Legal Considerations When Delaying or Adapting Elections.60 Many of the solutions being suggested and adopted mark a fundamental shift from how elections have been International Foundation for Electoral Systems -11-