should also be given in the longer term to ensuring the legal framework for elections is robust enough to preserve international standards, while flexible enough to allow for an effective response to different types of crises. Election Amendments and the Hierarchy of Laws Legal frameworks for elections are made up of one or more pieces of legislation governing all aspects of the process for electing political institutions.55 Differing levels of specificity and flexibility are built into the law depending on the particular country context. The current crisis context is illuminating challenges around either a rigid or flexible legal framework. Some countries have a very prescriptive electoral code, laying out the specifics of election administration and polling processes in significant detail. Sometimes this type of legal framework is developed because there is little trust in institutions, and there is a desire to carefully prescribe — and in some cases constrain — institutional authority. Ideally, the EMB should be given the authority to develop and update specific by-laws or regulations while protecting fundamental rights in the constitution and legislation, which are more difficult to amend.56 This then gives the EMB the ability to determine how the law should be implemented in practice, and to adapt procedures accordingly without needing to modify the law. As noted above, understanding the hierarchy of laws helps to clarify how the different levels of law will apply in practice, what details exist at each level, and what will require modification.57 When modifying an electoral process — whether in crisis situations or not — it is important to identify and understand where amendments might be possible or necessary. Where operational details of how an election runs are set out in the administrative regulatory or procedural framework, it will be Where operational details such as queue control and staggered polling times easier for an EMB to make changes are set out in the administrative regulatory or procedural framework, it will be quickly, if it has authority to draft and easier for an EMB to make changes quickly. amend administrative regulations and procedures, which ideally it should. Some modifications may require no regulatory or procedural changes, but simply an adjustment in planning and execution. For example, in the recently held South Korea parliamentary elections, the EMB encouraged voters to utilize existing early voting provisions58 that allowed eligible voters to cast ballots ahead of Election Day, which in turn dispersed the number of voters at a polling station. The EMB also made administrative changes to extend postal voting, which already existed under the law, to COVID-19 patients and those in quarantine.59 As noted by International IDEA in its analysis of the South Korea elections: “these measures … could not have been pulled off so timely and seamlessly, hadn’t numerous legal and procedural provisions to facilitate inclusion and participation of voters been already part of its electoral framework.” Another lesson from the South Korea experience is the use of “soft law” mechanisms to set out modified procedures. For voters going to the polls on Election Day, the South Korea EMB developed a Code of International Foundation for Electoral Systems -15-