Guidelines for Understanding, Adjudicating, and Resolving Disputes in Elections ing for the trust and support of the voters of their communities. For each of them, there is a great deal invested in the outcome of the election. When irregularities arise in the election, a political party has a vested interest in ensuring that these irregularities did not taint the results. The filing of complaints is a common response. Sometimes frustrations stem from unrealistic expectations, and a failure to fully understand the complaints resolution process and their rights and obligations relative to it. For a party to fulfill this function effectively, training may need to be provided. The following materials are designed to detail challenges that may be faced and a program format that may be utilized in such training for political parties. B. Challenges i. Untested or under-developed election complaint laws Under-developed elections complaint laws and regulations pose a significant problem for design of training programs, as the substance needed for the training will be woefully inadequate or missing. Organizers may feel the need to infer the necessary steps taken to successfully carry forth a challenge. It is critical that all such interpretive opinions offered are clearly prefaced as such. A related scenario emerges when the law is clearly written, but it has not been thoroughly tested in practice. In this situation there is a possibility that the legislature left gaps that require an interpretation or opinion by the judiciary, thus lending less predictability to the outcome. On some occasions, the written law and traditional practices do not fully mesh, thus leading to confusion in regards to the proper avenues to pursue full adjudication (for a salient example of this issue, see the Philippines case study in Chapter 4: Case Studies Related to Training of Arbiters in Election Complaints). These circumstances must be accommodated very carefully in considering how to approach them during the training and in any written materials that are distributed. It is critically important that the organizer of the training is not perceived as offering legal advice. At every instance, participants should be reminded that they should seek appropriate legal counsel and a pre-scripted disclaimer should be included not only in the oral presentation, but also in all written materials distributed to participants. 148