International Foundation for Electoral Systems government.21 The declaration includes a provision for increasing access to and use of new technology in order to make government practices transparent, secure online spaces and platforms, and provide “alternative mechanisms of civic engagement.”22 The Open Government Declaration also provides standards that require signatories to “increase the availability of information about governmental activities.” This includes open access to government data so that information can be easily found and used. The importance of open data is enshrined in the declaration: “We recognize the importance of open standards to promote civil society access to public data, as well as to facilitate the interoperability of government information systems.”23 These standards will be essential when implementing voting and counting technology, where individual information must be securely and transparently stored and checked to ensure the validity of both the voters and the votes. b) Best Practice Guidelines for Implementing Election Technology Improper management and implementation of technology can discredit an entire electoral process, leading to public disenchantment with elections and even violence. Although there are a variety of different principles for data collection and management, there is no single set of good practice guidelines for their implementation. A substantial number of intergovernmental and international nongovernmental organizations, including the Council of Europe, European Commission, IFES, International IDEA, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR), among others, have contributed guidelines and handbooks on election technologies. There are three recent publications that connect cybersecurity and elections. They are all valuable contributions in advance of upcoming elections around the world and the use of technology therein. In February 2018, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) published A Handbook for Elections Infrastructure Security, which establishes election system risks and how to mitigate them through a detailed use of good practice that county or state election administrators could implement.24 Academic institutes such as the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center have also contributed to the literature in this space, with a State and Local Election Cyber-Security Playbook, that is designed for U.S. election officials but can also 21 Open Government Partnership, Open Government Declaration, 2011, https://www.opengovpartnership.org/open-government-declaration. Since joining in 2011, Hungary and Turkey withdrew their participation. Azerbaijan’s status is inactive since 2015. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Calkin et al., A Handbook for Elections Infrastructure Security, Center for Internet Security, 2018, https://www.cisecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CIS-Elections-eBook-15-Feb.pdf. 8