ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For more than thirty years, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) has assisted courts, election management bodies, anti-corruption agencies, police, prosecutors and adjudicators to address electoral disputes and violations. We have helped with defining laws and procedures, holding hearings, managing caseflow, documenting decisions, and training staff in stakeholder institutions within a framework of internationally accepted principles. Based on this experience, we have identified two gaps that present unique challenges to adjudicators in many countries and, in many instances, undermine confidence in electoral results: first, a lack of clear definitions and approaches to implementing effective remedies to electoral disputes (a challenge we have outlined in International Election Remedies, John Hardin Young (ed.), American Bar Association, 2016); and second, few sources for international principles that apply to the investigation of electoral crimes and electoral complaints. Over the years, we have had many conversations with judges who must make highly political decisions in a compressed timeline on electoral claims that are not properly supported by admissible and substantiated evidence. This guidebook is the product of our efforts to close this gap and better support our partners in election adjudication around the globe. To inform the guidebook, IFES conducted surveys and interviews, reviewed the available literature, and analyzed case law. IFES’ work is guided by international principles and comparative experience, and we endeavor to make our publications as practical as possible. Accordingly, we relied on international public law to provide a framework though which to identify standards for election investigations, and then on comparative experience to identify concrete recommendations to implement these standards in practice. As with most new areas of comparative legal research, gathering the information for a publication like Election Investigations Guidebook is not an easy task. This guidebook is the result of hundreds of hours of effort by numerous people over several years, including legal fellows who conducted research, colleagues and practitioners around the globe who provided examples and 5