A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE TO INCREASING WOMEN’S ACCESS TO ELECTORAL JUSTICE Summary of Recommendations For Election Management Bodies • Utilize political party liaison structures as appropriate to support political parties in standardizing, implementing, and enforcing gender-sensitive intraparty dispute resolution processes. Develop model guidelines, codes of conduct, and principles to guide the resolution of intraparty disputes. • Provide comprehensive, gender-responsive voter education to all citizens regarding their rights and responsibilities as voters. Deliver this education throughout the election cycle and through a variety of methods and media. Voter education should include information on how to report suspected violations of the law, file complaints, and get additional information and resources on electoral justice. • Partner with civil society organizations (CSOs) to train women from around the country to serve as community voter education ambassadors to take voter information to their communities and conduct door-to-door campaigns sharing voter information. • Provide standardized candidate training on the country’s election law. Include information on any intra- and inter-party dispute resolution mechanisms available as well as the formal electoral dispute resolution (EDR) process and any available alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes. • Strive for gender parity among staff at all levels and promote affirmative action measures that result in more women serving in electoral institutions, especially in leadership positions. • Train and designate women EMB staff members as points of contact for campaign regulation information and to field reports of violations or harassment against women candidates. These positions should be established across the country and publicized. • Train Election Day staff to help ensure gender issues are integrated into their electoral operations, including for security personnel. • Train all staff on implicit and unconscious bias, stereotyping, gender equality, healthy masculinities, and other relevant topics to help shift harmful cultural and social gender norms and to create a more enabling environment for women to participate in elections and report electoral violations. • Establish a gender unit or department responsible for training and gender-mainstreaming programs, processes, and resources. • Work with the judiciary, civil society, and political parties to explore the development of an ADR mechanism for the resolution of elections complaints, as appropriate. Ensure the equal representation of women as mediators and training on gender-sensitive dispute resolution for all personnel. For the Judiciary/EDR Mechanisms • Strive for gender parity at all levels of staff and promote affirmative action measures and mentoring programs that result in more women serving in the justice sector, especially in leadership positions or on more senior courts. • Provide training on gender-sensitive electoral justice, including on topics such as gender equality; cases or complaints that are more likely to affect women and political violence against women, including violence that occurs as part of the electoral cycle and violence that occurs online; gender quota rules; and any other specific provisions that support women’s political participation. • Establish a gender unit or department responsible for training and gender-mainstreaming programs, processes, and resources. • Seek to make court services more readily available to all potential litigants, first addressing barriers that particularly impact women, including court fees and the cost of traveling to file complaints. • Expand the availability of remote filing and remote or virtual court processes, and endeavor to make virtual court stations – with computers and reliable internet connections – more widely available. • Utilize a case management system (CMS) to track and report gender-disaggregated data on the electoral justice cases brought at every stage of the process, including the nature of the claims brought, the number and gender of complainants who appear pro se, and the outcomes of those EDR processes, at every level. Require political parties to report data on the number of cases in which they 9