ELECTION WATCHDOGS
5/30/17 11:29 AM
Chapter 5
Election Audits: Principles and Practices
Erica Shein and Chad Vickery1
with Staffan Darnolf, Katherine Ellena, Emily Lippolis, Dan Murphy, Jed Ober, and Naomi Rasmussen
Where elections have integrity, the bedrock democratic principle of political equality
is honoured; citizens select their leaders, and hold them accountable. Where elections
lack integrity, politicians, officials and institutions are not accountable to the public...In these cases democratic institutions are empty shells, deprived of the ethos and
spirit of democracy.
The Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security
(International IDEA and The Kofi Annan Foundation 2012.)
The legitimacy of this voting process [in Afghanistan] is obviously at stake. There were
millions of people that voted in the first round and then again in the second round of
elections. They deserve to be counted accurately and to demonstrate that democracy
works.
U.S. State Department Official, 12 July 2014
(Gall and Rosenberg 2012).
In both developed and developing democracies, elections promise a widely-accepted route to peaceful transfers of power. Elections are, nonetheless, contests saddled with many of the difficulties posed
by other competitive pursuits: questions about the credibility of the authorities setting the rules or
refereeing outcomes; sharp imbalances in knowledge of the rules; players who fail to live up to the
spirit of the competition as well as its letter; and unwillingness of the losers to accept the final result
without a fight (The Electoral Integrity Project 2016; Drumond 2015; International IDEA 2012).
Many elections do lead to clear outcomes, in which one candidate or party is the resounding winner
by a large and acceptable margin, or an acceptable coalition government emerges. Close contests, on
the other hand, are more frequently challenged, throwing any concerns about transparency, accountability, and compliance into sharp relief. Credible and widely-accepted outcomes require an unimpeachable foundation: a resilient and clear legal framework, transparent rules and decision-making
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