International IDEA’s EJD is intended to help electoral legislation reformers and other actors concerned with electoral justice to develop efficient EDR systems. It is also expected to inspire academic enquiry into unexplored areas of legal institutions for EDR systems, trigger new questions about the functioning of EDR systems and contribute to improving their role in levelling the playing field for electoral competition. Such comparative data has not been collected before, and even the EJD itself previously provided only general data. Therefore, the EJD is now filling a significant knowledge gap with regard to the institutions in charge of electoral justice. The structure of the Electoral Justice Database The structure of the EJD and its general methodological approach to data collection mostly build on Electoral Justice: The International IDEA Handbook (Orozco-Henríquez et al. 2010). Readers of this report and users of the database are encouraged to consult the Handbook to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the concepts used and rationale behind the research. References to the Handbook have been added throughout this report. The structure of the EJD was designed to partly reflect the Handbook’s division of EDR systems into three different types, namely: 1. EDR systems that either provide a formal remedy or are corrective in nature, such as the means of bringing electoral challenges that can annul, modify or acknowledge an irregularity; 2. EDR systems that are punitive in nature, and which impose a penalty on the perpetrator, entity or person responsible for the irregularity, such as election-related administrative and criminal liabilities; and 3. Alternative mechanisms for electoral dispute resolution which are voluntary for the parties in dispute and frequently informal. Figure 2.2 shows the structure of the EJD and provides a description of each part of the database. It should be noted that alternative EDR mechanisms are not covered in the EJD because the data in the database is based on the texts of legislation, while alternative EDR mechanisms are mostly informal institutions. It should be noted that, in practice, electoral disputes can arise at any point in the electoral cycle, and some of these types of disputes are not covered in the existing four parts of the EJD. For example, complaints related to voter registration and disputes related to general election campaigns are not currently covered in the EJD. 12