Article 21 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides the legal and moral justification for electoral assistance. Since the Declaration’s adoption and proclamation in 1948, the notion of international electoral assistance has undergone various transformations and been interpreted in various different ways. Nevertheless, it has always been firmly rooted within the wider domain of “democracy assistance” efforts.

Almost all established democracies had, by the 1960s, included election assistance in the framework of their democracy assistance initiatives in favour of developing countries; as such assistance had been identified as an important stabilising factor, a facilitator for economic development and a useful foreign policy instrument. At the same time, election assistance has also been used to justify interventions and even interference in countries of specific strategic interest. An early form of electoral assistance was that lent to political parties in the 1960s and 1970s in many countries of Southern Europe and Latin America by the US government or by other agencies such as the German or British political party foundations (see “Aiding Democracy Abroad, the Learning Curve” Carothers, 1999). Subsequently, established democracies began providing support for constitutional referenda and transitional elections through their respective development cooperation agencies or more often, through specific contributions to multilateral institutions. Apart from the ‘Balkan Parenthesis’, where for a very specific set of circumstances the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was entrusted with the organisation of elections by the Dayton Peace Agreement for Bosnia and by the Rambouillet Accords for  Kosovo, one can clearly single out three actors that shaped the way electoral assistance has been justified and delivered since the 1960s: the United Nations, the United States and, from the mid-90s, the European Commission.

The UN’s involvement with electoral activities began in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s,[1]  when the Trusteeship Council assisted with the observation or supervision of some 30 plebiscites, referenda or elections in various regions of the world.  By the late 1980s, UNDP had financed several small-sized projects that provided some form of assistance on specific technical aspects of electoral processes and on the establishment of the related infrastructure necessary to conduct elections. Also at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the UN had begun to engage in major electoral missions of three kinds – the organisation and conduct of elections (such as through the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia through UNTAC in 1993); the supervision and control of elections (such as in Namibia through UNTAG in 1989); and the verification of electoral processes (such as in El Salvador through ONUSAL in 1994).

These activities, along with rising demand from Member States for technical assistance by the UN, led to the introduction in December 1991 of a General Assembly (GA) Resolution 46/137 on “Enhancing the Effectiveness of the Principle of Periodic and Genuine Elections”. Since then, the Secretary-General has reported biannually to the GA on “appropriate ways and means of enhancing the effectiveness of the principle of periodic and genuine elections, in the context of full respect of the sovereignty of Member States.”  GA resolution 46/137 also called for
the UN to designate a senior official to act as a Focal Point for electoral assistance activities inter alia to ensure consistency in the handling of requests of Member States organising elections, to assist the Secretary-General to coordinate and consider requests for electoral verification, and to channel requests for electoral assistance to the appropriate office or programme.

The GA resolution also recommended that an office be created to support the Focal Point in these functions, and since 1992, the United Nations Electoral Assistance Division (UNEAD) has filled this role. All UN electoral assistance must follow a request made by a recognised national authority and most assistance delivered in cooperation with national actors in non-crisis situations has relied heavily on UNDP’s financial and personnel resources. Also important, however, are the major activities that have been implemented through the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in the context of peacekeeping missions and, increasingly, in an integrated “one UN” manner that draws on the mandates and expertise of different agencies of the UN family in a given country.

UNDP’s field presence and traditional custodianship of the UN Resident Coordinator system proved important facilitating factors for the implementation of the UN electoral assistance: UNDP resident officials provided established relationships with government, bilateral development agencies, non-governmental organisations and political parties, as well as logistical infrastructure, country knowledge and financial resources for the mobilisation of assistance. The support provided from the late 1980s through the late-1990s, however, did not benefit from long-term planning, but was often directed at obtaining the maximum results in the shortest possible timeframe.

Similarly, towards the end of the 1980s the US started to offer electoral assistance through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy. This development occurred after Presidents Carter and Reagan made democracy promotion a central strategy of the US foreign policy. Initially, the emphasis of the assistance was heavily placed on election observation missions and political party support - with a private foundation like The Carter Center specialising in electoral observation, and institutions such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) more active in political parties’ development. It was in 1987 that USAID also began to consider the establishment of a more technical-oriented and professional NGO, dedicated exclusively to providing assistance to the organisation of the technical aspects of electoral processes in developing countries. This was when IFES was established as the International Foundation for Election Systems (see for a detailed account “Every Vote Counts”, IFES 2007). Since then, USAID has generally maintained a sort of division between the political party and civil society organisations (CSOs) development work (generally entrusted to specialised institutions like NDI and IRI, and the technical assistance activities in support of electoral processes that are generally entrusted to IFES. Thanks to a sound and technical-oriented approach to electoral assistance, IFES has grown in these twenty years to become the most respected NGO in this field, providing electoral technical assistance across the globe in a very large range of electoral-related activities and always dedicating resources for the professionalism and independence of Election Management Bodies (EMBs).

The EC has been active for a decade an a half in the field of electoral assistance, and its activities have always been firmly established within the larger domain of democracy promotion, as set forth in Article 6 of the European Union Treaty. Over this period, the forms through which this support has been provided have evolved considerably and become much more substantive then mere financial contributions to projects designed and managed by other international institutions and agencies. The EC began funding electoral support missions in 1993 with the observation of the first multi-party elections in Russia, and in 1994 with the first multiracial elections in South Africa. In 1994 the EC also provided significant financial and technical support to an electoral event of specific relevance to its foreign policy - the Legislative and Presidential Elections in Mozambique, the first elections in the country after the end of the civil war and the related Peace Agreement. Since then, EC electoral support activities have grown considerably in their number and scope:  the Palestine Authority Presidential Elections in 1996 were supported both in terms of technical assistance and observation. Since then, electoral assistance projects were mainly supported through the development cooperation funds, but continued to be programmed on an ad hoc basis without any standardised and strategic approach for a number of years. In this context, EC Regulation 976 of 1999 and the EC Communication 191 of April 2000 on “Electoral Assistance and Observation” marked a significant step towards the conceptualisation of electoral assistance and observation as complementary activities and towards the harmonisation of the interventions.

After a period where electoral assistance activities remained somewhat uncoordinated and not very visible at the global level, the EC is now a leading global actor in providing electoral support, both in terms of electoral assistance and electoral observation. The creation of a quality support unit within the main implementation arm of the EC, Europe Aid, steered the steep increase of funding designated to electoral assistance operations (from 2004 to 2006, about 320m EUROs), with senior level attention increasingly focused on the specific challenges of supporting elections in post-conflict scenarios. In parallel the EU Election Observation programme has built on its initial achievements and consolidated a reliable methodology that can be applied consistently anywhere in the world. Since 2000, the EU has deployed some 50 observation missions in 35 different countries, which have contributed greatly to the mitigation of conflict and the deterrence of election fraud.

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