Assessing Electoral Fraud in New Democracies: Refining the Vocabulary IV. Where Do We Go From Here? The purpose of IFES' White Paper Series on Electoral Fraud has been to raise attention about the scourge of fraud that is undermining electoral processes in countries around the world, and especially its effects on transitional countries. We have sought to provide stakeholders with some of the tools they need to detect, deter and mitigate fraud outcomes. A key component of that effort is to ensure that the election community has a clear and practical framework for understanding the issues. In that spirit, we chose to take a step back for this paper, the third in the series, and address lingering concerns about the definition for electoral fraud. We have proposed segmenting the universe of offenses and crimes undermining elections into three main categories: electoral fraud, electoral malpractice and systemic manipulation. The electoral fraud category highlights the role of intent and the potentially wide array of actors. The malpractice category draws on the idea of a duty of care for election professionals, which is a relatively new application of this concept in the study of elections. As depicted in Figure 1, there is also an area of overlap between fraud and malpractice, which is reserved for extreme instances of malpractice that rise to the level of criminality. As noted earlier, we have not dealt with the third category, systemic manipulation, in great detail here, but it refers to the use of domestic legal provisions and/or electoral rules and procedures that run counter to international public law principles and obligations, and that purposefully distort the will of voters.30 Electoral fraud: Deliberate wrong-doing by election officials or other electoral stakeholders, which distorts the individual or collective will of the voters Electoral malpractice: The breach by an election professional of his or her relevant duty of care, resulting from carelessness or neglect While fraud and malpractice have been the focus of this paper and this series, electoral integrity is a much wider area of practice. IFES’ electoral integrity portfolio includes several areas of programming that complement work on electoral fraud and malpractice, including: developing, improving and enforcing political finance regulations; assisting nations in developing appropriate legal structures and effective election complaint adjudication systems; and promoting election security through a mix of conflict analysis, prevention, mitigation and resolution methods throughout the electoral cycle. The overall legitimacy of an election and, by extension, public confidence in democratic governance around the globe, largely depends on the actual and perceived integrity of the electoral process. While the definitional question is just part of the much greater effort that is required, we believe that the distinctions outlined in this paper will greatly aid practitioners as they create and implement plans to ensure electoral integrity. 30 Systemic manipulation, supra note 2. 13