Finally, the design of electoral systems today takes place in the context of a number of international covenants, treaties and other kinds of legal instruments affecting political issues.
While there is no single complete set of universally agreed international standards for elections, there is consensus that such standards include:
- the principles of free, fair and periodic elections that guarantee universal adult suffrage,
- the secrecy of the ballot and freedom from coercion, and
- a commitment to the principle of one person, one vote.
Moreover, while there is no legal stipulation that a particular kind of
electoral system is preferable to another, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of issues that are affected by electoral systems, such as the fair representation of all citizens, the equality of women and men, the rights of minorities, special considerations for the disabled, and so on.
These are formalized in international legal instruments such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in the various conventions and commitments concerning democratic elections made by regional organizations such as the European Union (EU) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Organization of American States (OAS), Council of Europe (COE) and the Commonwealth.
Reproduced by permission of International IDEA from Electoral System Design: The New International IDEA Handbook © 2005 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance The electronic version of this publication is made available under a Creative Commons Attribute-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence. You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the publication, and to remix and adapt it, provided it is only for non-commercial purposes, that you appropriately attribute the publication and that you distribute it under an identical license. For more information on this licence see: