than once which is classified as electoral fraud. This level of detail can be obtained from the ‘Sources’ section of the online database, which provides quotes from the legislation and lists all the types of offences as they appear in the laws. Figure 6.2. Which types of election-related misconduct are regarded as criminal offences? Obstructing the electoral process Electoral fraud Incentive driven voter coercion 3% 2% 7% 97% 98% Threat driven voter coercion 93% Offences related to voter registration Unlawful conduct of campaign financing 17% 47% 53% 57% 83% Offence is covered in the law Offence is not covered in the law Notes: Data for 169 countries. Graph represents the data in EJD as of August 2015. Figure 6.2 shows that the first four types of criminal offence appear in the legislation of the vast majority of countries. However, among those four types of offence, incentive- and threat-driven voter coercion do not appear in the legislation of 7 per cent and 17 per cent of countries, respectively. This indicates that the legislation of these countries should be reviewed in the light of the requirements of international obligations and standards governing elections. For instance, International IDEA (Tuccinardi et al. 2014) quotes the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s General Comments: ‘CCPR, GC 25, p. 11. States must take effective measures to ensure that all persons entitled to vote are able to exercise that right. . . . Any abusive interference with registration or voting as well as intimidation or coercion of voters should be prohibited by penal laws and those laws should be strictly enforced’. Misconduct and irregularities related to voter registration and campaign finance are not classified as criminal offences in almost half the countries included in the research. It could be argued that 49 43%

Select target paragraph3