International Foundation for Electoral Systems open the possibility that practitioners and international actors will have little recourse for addressing systemic manipulation or problems with potentially large-scale implications for elections in countries with weak legal provisions, or when legal means are purposefully used to manipulate election outcomes.13 For example, legislators in some countries use ostensibly legal means to specifically prevent opposition parties from getting on the ballot by implementing unreasonably high threshold requirements (e.g., an extremely high number of signatures from voters or onerous requirements for regional offices). The restrictive approach also fails to account for potentially destabilizing activities or new types of systemic manipulation that might satisfy the domestic legal framework, but which violate the spirit of internationally-accepted political rights.14 Where appropriate, election administrators and other stakeholders need to have the detection, deterrence and mitigation tools necessary to manage malpractice and systemic manipulation that is not necessarily addressed by existing laws. The benefit of the law-based approach is that it permits observers to dispense with the thorny issues of cultural, political or contextual relativism. That is, many authors believe that a more inclusive approach, which draws on norms or principles that may not be reflected in domestic law, will not necessarily be meaningful in all countries. As the editors of Election Fraud note, “the relative nature of election fraud and the widely variant historical, cultural and institutional contexts in which election fraud has occurred make the development of a clear and consistent definition a complicated, if not impossible, undertaking.”15 By way of example, they cite allegations of fraud in Mexico’s 2006 presidential election, when political parties canvassed neighborhoods and the outgoing president announced his endorsement of one of the candidates – both unremarkable facets of the electoral process in the United States, but which were highly controversial in the Mexican context.16 Use of a law-based approach provides a possible solution for this problem, as it is inherently country-specific. Unfortunately, this does not fully circumvent the main weakness of the restrictive approach; namely, that focusing only on the letter of the law might eliminate from consideration practices in countries with legal provisions that are weak or have an intentionally manipulative or distortive effect on the election process. In addition, as the editors of Election Fraud note, “a narrow legal definition of election fraud…could lead to incorrect 13 From a practical standpoint, a key argument for use of a strictly domestic law-based approach is that it provides a clear avenue for detecting, deterring, and mitigating improper acts committed by election professionals or other stakeholders. Although, as discussed above, a country could be held liable to international standards via the use of regional courts or the pressures that can be applied by diplomatic missions and election observation reports, it is not possible to prosecute or hold accountable individuals without a domestic legal standard in place. We do not believe, however, that this limitation automatically implies that the scope of fraud and professional malpractice must be limited exclusively to acts prohibited by the law. By widening the field to include some international standards for credible elections, practitioners will have recourse to identify and mitigate improper influences on the electoral process that are not necessarily outside the scope of current laws. This approach will be especially relevant to tackling the issue of electoral malpractice, which, as described in the next section of this paper, focuses on negligence by election officials. 14 Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides for the following rights applicable to the exercise of the vote and the expectation of free and fair elections: “Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 2 and without unreasonable restrictions: (a) To take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives; (b) To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors; (c) To have access, on general terms of equality, to public service in his country.” 15 Alvarez, Hall, and Hyde, page 9. 16 Ibid, pages 3-4. 6