When the fairness of elections is called into question, we need an effective process of complaints adjudication to sift the facts and determine whether proper election procedures were followed as prescribed in laws and regulations. If they were, then the election results reflected the will of the people. If not, then appropriate remedies are invoked to assure that the will of the people will be followed. IFES has provided technical and logistical support in conducting democratic elections to countries worldwide. An important part of this work has been training commission members, lawyers, judges, civil society group members and members of the media in the legal and practical aspects of resolving election disputes under the rule of law. IFES works one-on-one with representatives of countries’ administrative, legislative and judicial branches and presents information by panels consisting of experts on international election law, and leaders of a country’s interest and professional groups, to give stakeholders considered evaluations of the interaction between international standards and the country’s own legal and administrative complaints adjudication mechanisms. Those presentations, and the discussions that follow them, provide stakeholders with a clear understanding of how to anticipate the issues that are likely to arise in an upcoming election, and how to handle them when they occur. Beginning in 1965, my work with elections involved enforcing the U.S. Voting Rights Act and other U.S. voting rights laws. Since 1995, I have worked as an international election observer, and I have been a part of presentations and trainings on voting rights, legal procedures and election complaints adjudication in many countries on four continents. Those efforts resulted in the IFES publication of my book, The Resolution of Election Disputes in 2006, with a second edition in 2008. It is with this background that I am so pleased to welcome IFES’s new Guidelines for Understanding, Adjudicating, and Resolving Disputes in Elections (GUARDE). The GUARDE manual provides read- xix