Assessing Electoral Fraud in New Democracies: Refining the Vocabulary policy prescriptions.”17 It could also give countries the means to sidestep international principles and, in many cases, international obligations that apply to the electoral process.18 Still, this approach has proven popular in the small community of writers who have contributed to this discussion. Lehoucq has written extensively on the subject of electoral fraud. Although his definitions tend to be broad (hence their mention in the previous category), he has also offered several modifications that narrow the field. In his 2003 paper, Lehoucq takes several passes at defining electoral fraud. He modifies his first approximation (that fraud is defined as “all clandestine efforts to shape election results”) with the additional clarification that “both blatantly coercive acts and voting irregularities are also fraudulent because they can throw election results,” and that an act is fraudulent if it breaks the law. He finds that this legalistic definition is useful because it segments political activities in an accessible way: they are either acceptable or unacceptable under the law.19 Lehoucq’s earlier work, a 2002 book entitled Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica, provides insight into the thinking behind this definition. Lehoucq and his fellow author Ivan Molina define electoral fraud as “activities that can alter the results of the ballot box and that violate electoral laws.” The authors say that this definition allows for changes over time in the range of acts believed to be fraudulent by political parties and other stakeholders, and it “does not assume that any constraint or act that encourages or compels voters to behave against their interests…is fraudulent.”20 The authors then proceed to use a four-fold classification system to assess allegations of acts of fraud: procedural irregularities; more severe infractions that do not necessarily involve fraud; severe acts of fraud; and coercion of voters. The dichotomy is complicated to parse and allows for a considerable grey area between categories, but it does, helpfully, attempt to distinguish between allegations of fraud in a way that accounts for the scale and intent of the action. However, it is unclear whether the statement “activities that can alter the results of ballot box” implies that fraud has only occurred when it impacts the outcome of the overall vote, or whether non-outcome determinative interference with the process would be included. Our definition, detailed below in Section III, attempts to deal with that distinction to ensure that all instances of electoral wrongdoing can be detected, deterred and mitigated. Regional bodies and individual states have also tackled the issue in the course of producing guidelines for combating fraud. In 2010, the Council of Europe’s European Commission for Democracy through Law, known as the Venice Commission, adopted a report on “Figure Based Management of Possible Election Fraud.” The report noted that “in the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual. In a general election context, fraud could be any 17 Ibid, page 236. For a selection of provisions of international agreements to which most countries have acceded, and that are relevant to the conduct of a credible election, see: Articles 2, 16, 22 and 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm; Articles 8, 10, 20, and 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/; and Articles 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 21, and 29 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/disabilities-convention.htm. 19 Lehoucq, page 235. 20 Fabrice Lehoucq and Ivan Molina (2002) Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Electoral Reform, and Democratization in Costa Rica, Cambridge University Press, New York: page 17. 18 7